'Kinney was only eighteen,but moocah salesmen get them young.'

Donald Barr Chidsey worked in a wide variety of pulp genres from historical swashbucklers to contemporary crime stories. In "The Prairie Stretched Away" (Short Stories, July 25, 1940) he tried his hand at drug humor, though the story is probably on funny in retrospect. It intends to be a taut, suspenseful story, and I suspect that Chidsey brought a sense of irony to his sensitive subject matter, since narcotics are, in fact, instrumental to the story's happy resolution. The hero, Kinney, is introduced hitchhiking, hoping to make his way across the country after kicking what seems to have been a bad drug habit. Chidsey portrays a bleak, empty landscape, emphasizing his hero's isolation, until a truck nearly sideswipes Kinney on the shoulder of the road. As the truck goes on its way, Kinney finds that he's stumbled onto a line of wires that lead to the underside of a nearby bridge. Sure enough, he's also stumbled onto a band of gangsters who plan to blow up the bridge when a bus passes over it. The killers are professional and impersonal; they don't know who specifically ordered the atrocity or why it was ordered; it's all just a job of work to them, and though they're not to thrilled about the idea, they realize that they're going to have to kill Kinney as well. They're hiding out and shivering cold in a nearby shed and Kinney proposes to make himself useful by getting some kindling for a fire. You see, before they got to the shed, they passed over a stretch of weed that's actually a stretch of weed.

Kinney, seeing those weeds in the beam of the flashlight, swallowed hard and tried to think about something else. Sure he knew them! For he had not only used the stuff but when he got hard up he'd peddled it and packed it into cigarettes. So naturally he knew those weeds. They'll grow wild about anywhere. There's nothing fastidious about them.

Naive as I was, I thought, when his addiction had been mentioned earlier, that Kinney had been hooked on harder stuff than this. I had forgotten that circa 1940 many folks found it hard to imagine harder stuff than marijuana, the weed with roots in hell! Fearful though he is of falling back into addiction, Kinney calculates that his only way to thwart the bombing and escape alive is to set a heap of the stuff on fire -- Chidsey emphasizes that the weeds are sun-dried and ready for use -- and get both his captors and, inescapably himself, high as a kite. This gives Chidsey an opportunity to experiment, based on what experience I dare not say, in portraying a marijuana high.

He heard an automobile. This was with one mind; the other mind said that there were no automobiles in the world, and what of it anyway. But he heard this. It was far away. He glanced first at the tall man, then at the short one. Had they heard it too? Was it possible they didn't hear? Were they deaf?
After a long while the taller man got to his feet and moved slowly toward the door, which was very far away. He did not seem to walk; he seemed to float along. His lips were moving but Kinney did not hear any words.

*   *   *

Through every thinnest corporeal tissue and every minutest vein he could trace the circulation of his blood along each inch of its progress. He knew where it slowed, and where it churned fitfully ahead. He knew when every valve flapped. His heart had been beating so loudly that he was amazed that the others did not hear it, but now the shack was filled with glory that suffocated, and his heart labored no longer, a mere pump, but had become a fountain; the jet surged upward and struck against the roof of his mouth, and fell noisily back, splashing and scampering through his body, so that he tingled all over. Maybe he was having a hemorrhage? He thought that he would die very soon.

Meanwhile the tall gangster falls into  the telltale giggle of the marijuana addict familiar to all fans of Reefer Madness. He then grows agitated and violent, like the marijuana-smoking Mexican bandits of many another pulp tale. He's convinced that Kinney is trying to run away while Kinney is convinced that he isn't moving at all. He threatens Kinney with a shotgun that Kinney perceives to be "half a mile or more away. He fires, and Kinney hears "a dull, delayed, apologetic 'boom' which tumbled into oblivion, as though ashamed of itself." This failure reduces to gunman to helpless laughter. All the while, the short gangster remains in a stupor. Finally, when neither criminal can function, Kinney staggers out to catch the transcontinental bus, then wakes to learn that he's a hero, offered a big reward by the bus company, but like a proper pulp hero, Kinney would rather have a job. His mentor, the man who saved him from addiction, approves of his choice and tells him, "Give you a job? Why, if that's all they give you I'll go out and dynamite a few of their buses, myself!" That's so pulp, but so's the whole story.

THE PULP CALENDAR: August 21

Here's a 1937 Argosy without a table of contents in the Fiction Mags Index. Fortunately, a site dedicated to the pulp writings of L. Ron Hubbard has this issue covered with a detailed table. For Hubbard fans or followers, this issue is extra-special because the great man has a letter in Argonotes along with his story "Nine Lives." In the letter, Hubbard defends "fast-production" writers like Frederick Faust and H. Bedford-Jones against snobby critics, crediting them with more nimble brains and "unconscious technique," while saying of himself that " If I write less than fifty thousand a month, my idea-machine practically breaks down." As was often the case in the second half of the 1930s, Donald Barr Chidsey gets the cover with the debut of a new series. "Call Me Mike" introduces Mikkud-Phni Luangba, heir to the real of Kamorriri, and his American companion/bodyguard George Marlin. Mikkud-Phni, aka "Mike," has adventures all around the world when he's not studying at Princeton. The running gag is that Marlin usually is forced into frantic action to rescue Mike, while the prince views everything with placid bemusement -- though he shouldn't be underestimated in a fight. Chidsey published at least three more Mike stories: two in September 1937 and one in 1940. There may be more, since the Mike series isn't recognized in the Fiction Mags Index. The first three stories have "Mike" in the title, but the 1940 story is "Flight to Singapore," and other Mike stories may be similarly obscured. I've read a couple of the Mikes, and they're mildly amusing, though you can see how they'd quickly grow monotonous. Along with these highlights the Aug. 21 issue features serial chapters from Bennett Foster, John Hawkins and Arthur Leo Zagat and stories by Frank Richardson Pierce (possibly a No-Shirt McGee), Garnett Radcliffe and Bertrand L Shurtleff. Hubbard's stuff was pretty entertaining in these early days of his career, so this issue's probably a pretty good overall package.

THE PULP CALENDAR: August 7

During the years 1936-37 Donald Barr Chidsey was one of the dominant Argosy writers. He was on a particular tear in the summer of 1937, landing the cover three times in a two-month period. He specialized in fast-moving adventure tales in exotic settings and "Passage to Hong Kong" is typical of his output at the time. It's probably the best thing in this issue, which also includes a No-Shirt McGee south-western (the old sourdough got around!) by Frank Richardson Pierce and a Four Corners American gothic by Theodore Roscoe. The serials are Luke Short's King Colt, which wraps up this issue, John Hawkins' Strike and Arthur Leo Zagat's Drink We Deep, an exercise in the microscopic world subgenre of what were then called fantastics. Short stories by Berton E. Cook and William Corcoran round out a typically diverse issue from this era. Chidsey will return tomorrow in a 1936 issue from my own collection.

THE PULP CALENDAR: July 17

A beautiful Rudolph Belarski cover fronts this 1937 Argosy, advertising a good Fisher-Savoy story by Donald Barr Chidsey. The popular globetrotting team of detective and reformed thief were a safer bet for the cover than this issue's new serial, John Hawkins' Strike, an attempt at social realism by pulp standards. Theodore Roscoe offers one of his small-town gothic stories in his Five Corners series, while Luke Short continues King Colt and Judson P. Philips wraps up his harness-racing two-parter County Fair. Frank Richardson Pierce, William Chamberlain and Alexander Key -- later known for the Witch Mountain series -- contribute short stories. I read this one a few years ago thanks to the scanners who've made much of 1937 available online, and I remember it being pretty good overall.

Pulp Reading: Donald Barr Chidsey, "GRAVEYARD OF THE GODS," ARGOSY, April 17, 1937

Donald Barr Chidsey (1902-71) merited a New York Times obituary for his nonfiction writing, with a passing mention of his novel writing. His voluminous pulp output, perhaps predictably, went unmentioned. Chidsey broke into pulps at the same time he was publishing irreverent historical biographies like Sir Humphrey Gilbert: Elizabeth's Racketeer (which can be found on the Internet Archive). He published his first pulp story in Street & Smith's Detective Story in July 1931, then turned up in Adventure at the end of that year. He picked up the pace in 1932, creating his long-running hero Nick Fisher for Detective Fiction Weekly and making his Argosy debut that summer. Chidsey soon was publishing all over the place, including the two most prestigious detective magazines, Black Mask and Dime Detective. For the latter he created the team of Morton & McGarvey, which he moved to DFW after an apparent falling out with Popular Publications that saw him stop publishing in Adventure after 1936. By 1937 he published primarily in the Munsey pulps (DFW and Argosy) with occasional forays into the slicks. Despite some early historical stories that presumably would be in keeping with his non-fiction interests, Chidsey became primarily a detective and crime writer, specializing in exotic locations, particularly for the Nick Fisher and Eddie Savoy team. He diversified in the war years, returning to Adventure and publishing more in Blue Book. He stuck around pulp almost to the bitter end, publishing his last pulp fictions in Popular's Fifteen Detective Tales in 1954. "Graveyard of the Gods" is a typical Chidsey product of the mid-thirties, though it doesn't have a detective as a central character. Point of view shifts from the Hawaiian native who drunkenly divulges a secret to the kidnappers who exploit it to the detective who tracks them and inadvertently tips off the native, a sacred guardian who must enforce a powerful tabu. It's a briskly paced story enlivened (or burdened) with pulp exotica and if you dig that sort of thing, or if it doesn't bother you -- and you wouldn't be a pulp fan if it did -- you should enjoy this story from the golden age of Argosy. My scan comes with the wild V.E. Pyles cover that I use for wallpaper, the early ad pages and this issue's table of contents. You can download it from the link below:

Donald Barr Chidsey, "GRAVEYARD OF THE GODS,"

ARGOSY, April 17, 1937

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 17

This cover should look familiar to you. The April 17, 1937 Argosy was one of the first issues of the magazine I acquired for myself, in large part because of that wild V.E. Pyles cover. At this early point in my collecting, after reading my way through the Argosy collection at unz.org, Donald Barr Chidsey was one of the authors I knew I liked; another early purchase got me his three-part 1938 serial Midas of the Mountains. "Graveyard of the Gods" almost lives up to that image. Some gangsters in Hawaii learn from a drunken native that a certain small island is taboo, the native alone visiting it to perform sacred services, and figure its isolation will make it an ideal spot to stash a kidnap victim. They fail to anticipate that the normally amiable native might get suspicious, much less wise to their sacrilegious scheme, though they might have been in the clear if not for a detective asking questions. It's a solid, punchy story that you'll be able to see soon. For now, let's see what else this issue has to offer:

Frank Richardson Pierce's "The Limit" is uplifting without getting too mawkish; a lumberman and hunter who loses a leg in an accident is demoralized, convinced that he'll never hunt again, until friends hook him up with a three-legged pointer to inspire him. Joel Townsley Rogers' "Locusts From Asia," as this week's Argonotes explain, was written back in 1928 but subsequently lost by the author for eight years or so. It's an odd, purple-prosed affair about British and German planes alike being attacked at the height of World War I by a mysterious fleet of advanced planes piloted by barely-human easterners and commanded by a feral-seeming topless woman. This week's first of two installments is padded by a protracted encounter between a German ace and his mentor, a Jewish scientist, in which the ace demands superweapons to fight the British with. After he stalks off, the scientist is captured by the mystery fleet. I found "Locusts" severely overwritten, but I found the premise just outrageous enough to keep me interested -- which makes it a good thing that I have next week's issue, too.

Next week will also give me another installment of Eustace L. Adams' Revolution -- With Pictures, another of his kickass serials from a period where he seemed to bat them out effortlessly. In this one, a newsreel team gets embroiled in a Latin American civil war. I don't have the first installment but an Argosy recap will usually get you up to speed easily enough, and Adams writes well enough to make even a fragment entertaining. I found the same to be true for this week's installment of Garnett Radcliffe's Doomed Liner, which is more of a mystery thiller than the sort of disaster story the title suggests. Some maniacal jiu-jitsu expert is on a murder spree -- his finishing move is the "bum's rush" --  and may be part of some bigger conspiracy. This installment takes place mostly on land and is primarily detective work, though the Scotland Yard hero has a hairsbreadth escape from a flood of water and rats at the climax. I haven't read much by Racliffe but he impressed me this time. I'm still working my way through the conclusion of Richard Wormser's Carnival Queen but I read the original installment and liked it some time ago and I'm pretty confident in Wormser as a rule.

Richard Sale's "Spin Down, Spin In" is an ultimately predictable tale of a widow who blames a flier with a bad reputation for her bereavement and learns flying in order to seduce him into a murder-suicide-by-crash scenario. It's predictable in its happy ending, but I suppose that if the widow followed through it would only be a gruesome anecdote. That leaves "The Madness of Captain Jonas" by Albert Richard Wetjen. During my exploration of the unz.org trove Wetjen became one of my favorite writers for Collier's, a slick that ran a lot of pulpy stories. His Wallaby Jim stories (eventually adapted for film) seem awfully violent for a family magazine, but he did a lot of more conventional sea stories as well. Wetjen didn't publish in Argosy very often -- his main pulp hangout was Fiction House's Action Stories -- so I wonder whether his Argosy stories are Collier's rejects with not enough action for Action Stories. There's not much action in "Captain Jonas," which is almost a Twilight Zone type story, the captain's madness being a superstitious nature that infuriates the new mate who narrates the story, and the twist being that a navigation decision attributed to supernatural influence, but resulting from a mundane accident, allows the crew to survive a fog without running aground. The short story is an entertaining compendium of absurdities effectively told with enduring dismay, and while it lacks the blood and thunder of Wetjen in full pulp mode it fits in Argosy just fine.

As of now I've scanned the Chidsey story and will make it available for download later today, and now that I have that head start I've a mind to do a cover-to-cover scan of a pretty decent Argosy from one of the venerable weekly's last good years. At my rate of work I hope to present the complete issue for download before the end of the month. I think you'll like it. And lest we forget, this issue was sponsored by:

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 30

Today's cover story, from a 1937 Argosy, is a kind of crossover between the venerable weekly and its Munsey stablemate Detective Fiction Weekly. Nick Fisher and Eddie Savoy -- one a detective, the other a reformed thief -- were regulars in Argosy itself, while the police duo of Morton and McGarvey usually showed up in DFW. Pulp authors sometimes suggested that their various creations lived in a "shared universe." Pulps could even cross over with slicks if an author felt like it. I remember a story in the Wallaby Jim series Albert Richard Wetjen wrote for Collier's in which several other tough sea captains Wetjen had created for the pulps put in cameo appearances. I don't think I've read any Morton and McGarvey but I have read several Fisher-Savoys and they're pretty good.  While Ace of Emeralds is part one of two, this issue also offers a Dave McNally novelet by Richard Wormser, another obvious plus, and short stories by such dependables as Gordon MacCreagh, Frederick Painton and Frank Richardson Pierce. Edgar Rice Burroughs and western writer Bennett Foster continue serials as well. This looks like a good issue to have from what may have been Argosy's last great year, though the Burroughs means you may pay more for it than you really want.

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 6

I can't say much about this 1934 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly, but that cover is pure pulp. It reminds me a little of the "shudder pulps" that were becoming popular around this time, but DFW never really went that way. The mummy wrapping illustrates the lead story by George F. Worts, who may have been as close to a house star the Munsey line had at the time. Worts spent most of his time writing for Argosy, publishing occasionally in the slicks and starting a western comedy series for Blue Book in 1935. At Argosy Worts was the author of long-running series about the dynamic defense attorney Gillian Hazeltine, a Perry Mason precursor who feuded with a corrupt D.A., and Singapore Sammy, a globetrotting adventurer in pursuit of his unscrupulous father. As Loring Brent, Worts had yet another series of oriental adventures starring Peter the Brazen, named for his complexion rather than his attitude and thus arguably pulp fiction's original man of bronze. He had no series characters in DFW, as far as I know, but contributed the occasional stand-alone story like this one. I'll have more to say about Worts when he shows up in Argosy. Also noteworthy here is a serial chapter from Frederick "Max Brand" Faust. You never know when or why Faust will use his best-known pseudonym or one of the others. It doesn't seem to be genre-specific since he published both his westerns and his Dr. Kildare stories as Brand, though some of his alternate tags were associated with specific genres, e.g. George Challis's historical swashbucklers. Adding to this issue's interest for me is a Donald Barr Chidsey story that apparently didn't merit a mention of his name on the cover. Since Chidsey was placing stories in Black Mask around this time, this one, "Just Another Bum," is probably decent but not up to the top detective pulp's standard. Before this year was out he was showing up in Dime Detective, too, marking him as an elite mystery writer. Chidsey and Worts together might make this issue worth having, but they're both hit-or-miss writers in my opinion. I would like to know the story behind that cover, though.

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 4

Back on January 1 we took a look at an Argosy from that date in 1938. What a difference three years make! Later in 1938 the weekly cut its page count for the first time in many years, going down from 144 to 128. In the spring of 1940 came another cut, reducing the weekly page count to 112. Argosy remained the same on the outside until that summer, when it adopted the standard cover format you see here, eliminating the individual cover paintings that are pulp magazines' most appealing feature for many collectors. One suspects that this was a cost-cutting measure, since artists no longer had to be paid. But it may also have been another effort to mainstream Argosy. Read "Argonotes" letter columns from after the switch and you'll find some readers applauding the change. Those now-beloved, often lurid covers were considered by some, if not many, as pulps' most embarrassing feature. This more classy, if less exciting, cover design made it easier for some readers to carry an issue away from the newsstand or read the thing in public. The Munsey company must not have been satisfied with the results, since further changes were coming, as announced in this ad on the inside front cover.

 

At the same time that Munsey was trying to flood the pulp market with new titles in an attempt to claim market share for its "Red Star Line," the company seemed to believe that the pulp format itself was no longer viable for its flagship publication. Argosy wasn't the first pulp to experiment this way. Another of the Big Four general-interest pulps, Blue Book, had gone large (the technical term is "bedsheet") for a little while in the early 1930s, and would do so again, to tremendous aesthetic effect, later in 1941. By comparison, you can't help catching a whiff of desperation in Argosy's forthcoming transformation, which would prove the first of many changes in 1941, none of which inspired much confidence in the once-mighty magazine's long-term future.

Inside, the main event is a "short novel" by the prolific Donald Barr Chidsey. The Elizabethan setting would seem like a natural to Chidsey -- who had published a hard-boiled biography from the period, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Elizabeth's Racketeer, in 1932. But if anything Chidsey is too eager to show off his knowledge, including impenetrable street argot, in a "novel" that proves a little too short. To me, at least, the climax came a little abruptly after an elaborate buildup, and there's too much attention paid to the hero's junior pickpocket helper to my taste, too.

Instead, the best story of this issue is a short one by one of my favorites, Robert Carse. He specialized in stories of tough men in desperate circumstances. He's one of the top Foreign Legion writers but has impressed me in settings as diverse as Devil's Island and Depression U.S.A. "The Captain, The Parson and the Sea" pits a hardcase captain against a humane parson on a pre-Panama Canal voyage around Cape Horn to Gold-Rush California with a mutinous crew. The Parson initially sees the Captain as a brutal tyrant but discovers his virtues, and the necessity of some of his policies, along the way, while the Captain comes to respect the Parson as a man and a worker. Thankfully, Carse here resists the temptation, as he doesn't always do at this point in his career, to throw in a romantic subplot, though one is teased throughout by including a gambler's daughter among the passengers.

Otherwise, this issue finds us in the middle of one of Max Brand's popular Dr. Kildare serials, as well as a western serial by the dependable Bennett Foster and a flying serial, set in the barnstorming 1920s, by authentic pilot Louis C. Goldsmith, at this point a rising star among pulp writers, whose career was cut short by World War II and who died in a transport plane crash in Scotland in 1943. There's also a story in Dale Clark's comedy series about sleazy Hollywood agent J. Edwin Bell, which I rarely find funny and never find proper content for a pulp magazine. The Carse story is the highlight so here it is for you to download and read:

"The Captain, The Parson and the Sea," by Robert Carse.

Argosy Weekly, January 4, 1941.