THE PULP CALENDAR: September 19

A quick survey of Tarzan's appearances on pulp covers over the year reveals great uncertainty about the ape man's hair. Comic strips by Hal Foster, Burne Hogarth and their successors have done more than anything else to solidify the image of a black-haired Tarzan in many minds, but pulp artists like Argosy's Hubert Rogers often envisioned a lighter-haired jungle lord. This 1936 cover shows that the pulps hadn't yet caught up with the fashion set by Johnny Weissmuller in talking pictures. Before Metro Goldwyn Mayer put Weissmuller in a loincloth in a clear Pre-Code invitation to the female gaze, illustrators and filmmakers commonly clad Lord Greystoke in the sort of one-shoulder singlet you see here, some adding a fur headband to the ensemble. By the next time Argosy published a Tarzan serial, in 1938, he is finally in a loincloth. This seems to me a change for the better, as Tarzan now no longer looked like a caveman (especially with the club he sports here) or circus strongman. At this time Edgar Rice Burroughs was bouncing Tarzan back and forth between Argosy and Blue Book, with an exceptional sojurn in Liberty being the nearest the ape man came to the slicks. The other features this issue are Donald Barr Chidsey's novelette "Spanish for Goat," another novelette by William Chamberlain, short stories by Theodore Roscoe and W. C. Tuttle, and serials by L. G. Blochman and George Bruce, as well as a Stookie Allen "Men of Daring" strip about Wyatt Earp -- a hero nearly as fantastical in some renderings as Tarzan himself.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 6

This 1941 Argosy concludes Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Quest of Tarzan. The ape man has divided the shipwreck survivors into two colonies: the good people and the bad. The bad colony is a collection of stereotypes: both the old-fashioned "pig-eyed" German and the ultramodern Nazi, as well as an Arab slave trader and a bolshevistic Russian malcontent. Tarzan is right to separate them from the good guys, but in some possible parable about appeasement the good people try to help the bad guys while Tarzan is away battling Mayan transplants on this South Pacific isle, and the bad ones promptly steal everything valuable and run amok. They get what they deserve, while Tarzan first rescues a Mayan "native" from sacrifice, then does the same for a British woman who wanders into captivity. The Mayans think the ape man to be "Che," the god of the forest. I wonder whether Ernesto Guevara knew that meaning of the word when he took it as his nickname. In any event, the good people get off the island and Tarzan goes on his way. Burroughs would write one more Tarzan story involving the ape man in World War II. He submitted it to Argosy in 1945, but by then the magazine was Popular Publications' flagship monthly, and its editor turned Burroughs down. He published it as Tarzan and the Madman in 1947.

This issue has an ominous novelty to it. For the first time I can think of, Argosy headlines a non-fiction story; an anonymous (ghost-written?) account of "The Miracle of the Battleship Malaya," illustrated with photographs. The closest Argosy ever came to doing that before was in 1936, when it launched White Adventure, George O. Norville's serialized memoir of an Antarctic expedition. As 1941 ground on, the magazine would recruit its fiction writers to pen non-fiction war articles. You get the feeling that Argosy was chasing a "men's" audience that already was starting to grow alienated from fiction at a moment when the news arguably was more dramatic than any fiction. Of course, Blue Book had solicited non-fiction pieces for ages, but those always ran in the back of the book. Something else was going on here that points toward the supplanting of pulps a decade or so later by men's adventure magazines touting the reality of every outlandish tale they told. For now, however, we're still more interested in the fiction.

E. Hoffmann Price was one of the authors tasked with writing factual war stories later in the year. I doubt his December 13 report on the Philippines was more exciting than this issue's opening installment of his two-parter Faraway Loot. This is old-school pulp in a relevant setting: China, one theater of war where the action was not yet dutifully rendered as a morality play. The American hero has to haul out of a Central Asian city controlled by a Soviet diplomat, who gives him a treasure the man fully expects to reclaim by robbery. This is the Terry and the Pirates territory of clashing warlords, individual freebooters and the nebulous Invader on the horizon. I enjoyed it thoroughly and now regret that no one has scanned the September 13 issue with the conclusion.

 

We leap from China to Chinatown with Walter C. Brown's "The Shanghai Necklace." Along with Arden X. Pangborn, Brown was one of Argosy's Chinatown specialists. The difference between the two authors is that Brown often made his American policeman, Sergeant O'Hara (called "Sah-jin" in the hood) the hero of his stories, while Pangborn's policemen were often ignorant bigots. I have a theory that the Chinatown genre was the precursor of today's "urban fantasy" genre, which imagines colonies of supernatural beings living by their own laws in our midst. On their own terms, Chinatown stories must have appealed to readers with guilty fantasies of getting away with murder, as Chinese protagonists often do on the premise that their victims have it coming. Here, however, the murderer is a bad guy and it's up to "Sah-jin" to figure out who he is. While it's more fun to have Chinese protagonists like Pangborn's Wong Soo, Brown's story is still unapologetic pulp and helps make this issue the most entertaining of the 1941 issues we've looked at recently.

I even liked a story I didn't expect to, Robert Arthur's "The Boys From Mars." I didn't expect to like it because it's a sci-fi comedy in that arch style that introduces the protagonist with mock pretension as "Mr."  Worse, Mr. Dexter Dexter is a verbose. bombastic figure who should have been insufferable just on the strength of his name. Yet I was amused by his indefatigable cluelessness when confronted by saurian visitors from the planet Mars, whom he assumes almost to the end to be no more than carnival freaks. The Martians themselves are charming. Tinkerers determined to be the first Martians on Earth, would-be conquerors without being menacing, hypochondriacs who heard Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast and know to be on the lookout for germs, and yet so endearingly naive as to be captivated by a pulp magazine serial space opera. Their greatest regret on leaving the planet -- the food doesn't agree with them -- is that they won't find out what happened to the heroine after the cliffhanger. I usually find Arthur to be a bland author representing Argosy at its worst in its declining years, but "Boys From Mars" was better than it had any right to be. Since Richard Sale's serial Cape Spectre isn't really bad and George Michener's trifle "The Hardcase Cat" is over quickly, this issue as a whole shows that even at this late, bleak moment in its history -- it will cease to be a weekly one month later -- Argosy could still put together a credible package of pulp fiction when the stars were right.

THE PULP CALENDAR: August 30

When last we left Tarzan, the ape man was trapped in a floundering pulp weekly. Technically speaking, he's a captive on board an old wooden cargo ship that's been commandeered by a Nazi, but before long he and several supporting players in The Quest of Tarzan will find themselves stranded by shipwreck on that island Edgar Rice Burroughs mentioned in last week's prologue -- the one settled by refugees from the Mayan Empire. Maybe they're Mayans because Burroughs liked writing Mayan-esque names.But they behave like most primitives who encounter Tarzan, taking him first as a god but later showing skepticism, debating his divinity and his fate in a tongue he hasn't yet figured out. Meanwhile, Burroughs still finds it amusing to torment his stereotyped society dowager, for whom the sinking of the ship and the escape to the island are but the latest indignities she protests pretentiously unless Tarzan gives her a death stare. I guess it was a matter of whatever it took to reach his word count. Here's how Virgil Finlay sees it:

Moving right along, this 1941 Argosy launches another serial, Richard Sale's thriller Cape Spectre. The hero has been sent to take over a spooky accursed lighthouse that can't seem to keep any personnel despite its potential strategic importance. Sale tips us off to the problem: pest control. This first installment closes with our man discovering a rattlesnake in his bed. He finds something else: his predecessor is supposed to be long gone, but evidence indicates that the lighthouse radio was in use just minutes before our hero arrived. Hmmm...

This issue also concludes Murray R. Montgomery's rakehelly serial Swords in Exile, but since I came in too late to really immerse myself in the thing, I let it go with no further comment. As for the rest:

Two latter-day series characters (or sets of characters) take up most of the remaining space. L. G. Blochman's "The Magic Camel" continues the misadventures of Gundranesh Dutt, a "babu" (i.e. a native of India trained for the colonial bureaucracy) who runs the Grand International Detective Bureau in Calcutta with help from his cousin Danilal. Gundranesh weighs in at approximately 300 pounds, while illustrators portray Danilal as a near twin to Mahatma Gandhi. These are comedy stories, most of the comedy supposedly resulting from the funny way the Dutts talk. To be more specific, these are dialect stories in a way that the superficially comparable Charlie Chan novels are not. Chan is challenged by English grammar but clearly has a brilliant mind. Gundranesh Dutt does not.

"Cousin Danilal!" the fat babu exclaimed, "You are three days premature in semi-fortnightly visit from Barackpore. Scarcely recognized you in new green turban. You have also altered mustache with upward curls at terminals. Disguise, Cousin Dani?"

"No disguise," said Danilal Dutt. "Was merely testing imported American invention for curling hairs with heated iron device. Quite efficacious."

Try to deal with that for the length of a Short Novelet. Until recently, if not still, you could still get away with this sort of Indian dialect in comedy: verbose run-on sentences with a noticeable lack of pronouns. You're probably hearing the stock voice in your head. Anyway, as the illustration shows you, this is a slapstick story involving much chasing about on camel, same being pawn in jewel-smuggling operation unknown to Dutt. It's pretty sad stuff, not really funny enough to redeem its racism.

William DuBois' "S.S. Sabotage" also spotlights an ethnic detective of a sort. Willy Emathla, a college-educated Seminole, is part of a three-man team along with his millionaire mentor, "ash-blonde giant" Mike Towne, and Towne's other protege, two-fisted playwright Christopher Ames. The three work together -- Emathla is always deferential, but indispensably supercompetent, especially when violence is called for -- in a series of stories pitting them against the traitorous Paul Derring, described as resembling the actor John Gilbert. Theirs is an action-packed series, but none of the protagonists really has much of a personality. Willy behaves exceptionally here -- he's usually more like a Vulcan -- by applauding the premiere of Ames' latest play with a war whoop --before he prevents Ames' assassination by one of Derring's goons. Our heroes have to stop Derring from seizing a British freighter in the Caribbean without violating U.S. neutrality. Inevitably it loses some of pulp's buccaneering swagger in its sides-taking relevance to the world war, but "S.S. Sabotage" is a good story, particularly by Argosy's 1941 standards.

The rest of it consists of another too-slick story by Don Tracy, who was in last week's issue, and another in T. T. Flynn's comedy-western series about "Mrs. Wildcat," a tough Texas saloonkeeper. "Mrs. Wildcat's Last Stand" also features an educated Indian who actually gets the girl -- a white girl who was his college sweetheart, both being archaeologists -- after being mistaken for a savage kidnapper. Turns out the admirable young man is just trying to help stop his old man from trading invaluable tribal artifacts for firewater.

Next Tuesday we'll wrap up Tarzan, continue Cape Spectre, visit Chinatown and meet men from Mars while Argosy gets an injection of pure pulp from E. Hoffman Price. So long for now from 1941!...

THE PULP CALENDAR: August 23

By this time in 1941, Argosy's longtime stablemate Detective Fiction Weekly had ceased to be a weekly in another sign of the dire straits facing the Munsey Corporation. For all I know, by the time this issue hit the newsstands the decision had already been made to end the venerable weekly's weekly status. The proof wouldn't come for another month. For now, Argosy not only soldiered on but played an ace. Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan was born in another Munsey magazine, All-Story, back in 1912. Throughout his career, the ape-man bounced back and forth between the Munsey mags and the McCall company's Blue Book and Red Book, depending on who paid Burroughs more. He had last appeared in Argosy in a 1938 serial. Perhaps now the Munsey people thought Tarzan could save Argosy, at least for a little while.

 Virgil Finlay had been doing occasional interior illustrations for Argosy since 1939. 

This was not one of his finest hours.

The Quest of Tarzan gets off to a dubious start with some anticipatory exposition about Mayans settling islands in the South Pacific before moving on to the negotiations of a German ship owner and an Arab slave trader, the latter promising to provide the former with a wild man to exhibit in circuses. The German is briefly taken aback when told that the wild man is white, but once informed that the wild man is also "English born" the ancestral hatred takes over. For the Arab, apparently an old enemy of Tarzan, this will be sweet revenge. He's somehow learned that Tarzan got bonked on the head or something (in a previous adventure?) and has lost his memory, reverting to his most primitive self. I'd seen the amnesia gimmick done in the 1929 silent serial Tarzan the Tiger; had Burroughs himself done it before? Anyway, he's wandering through the jungle until the slavers capture him and deliver him to the German. Meanwhile, World War II has broken out and another German passenger takes advantage of the fact that the first German was sailing under a British flag to confiscate the vessel in the name of der Fuehrer. Tarzan acquires some cellmates, kills a snake and regains his memory, most likely because Burroughs had tired of the amnesia gimmick already. The ship takes on some British prisoners, including a stereotypical dowdy dowager and her more hip children. This is exactly what you want to do with Tarzan of the Apes: stick him out at sea on a boat. I expect he'll meet some misplaced Mayans before this three-parter is open, but I'm not sure you can take that for granted.

This is another Argosy without a table of contents on the Fiction Mags Index, but since all three issues containing The Quest of Tarzan have been scanned and made available online, I can fill in that gap.

While the Tarzan story features an evil German, Japanophobia prevails in this issue by a 2 to 1 margin. Sinclair Gluck's novelette "No Ticket to Nippon" has American gangsters helping the Japs smuggle a strategically valuable element out of the country. It sports some fragrant Japano-jibberish from the Nipponese villains, e.g. "Ah ha! Big dirty trick on me, please, Captain Coast Guard! I notta knowing thatta stuff! White man fooling Japanese skipper, please. Telling that cement! Ah ha! Dirty work, I think so!" You can easily imagine Jerry Lewis or Mickey Rooney playing the part. The Japanese retain some dignity in Hal G. Evarts' "Colonel Coolie," perhaps because, with the action set in China and his heroes Chinese, Evarts has no excuse to resort to vaudeville pidgin. In the story, a coolie survives torture and saves his unit virtually by accident, succeeding where the stratagems of his westernized, academy-trained commanding officer had failed.

I didn't bother with this issue's installment of Murray R. Montgomery's Swords in Exile, another in a sort of anti-Musketeer series about Cardinal Richelieu's personal troops, because it was part five of six. I did read the conclusion of Walt Coburn's two-parter Town Marshal because the previous issue, containing part one, is at unz.org. It's a typical Coburn combo of violent and romantic passion, a vicious outlaw being offered a pardon in order to clean up a still-more vicious cow town where he encounters an old flame and the old enemy she married. Coburn teases a romantic triangle involving the outlaw-turned-marshal, the young woman who inherits a ranch, and her hotheaded boyfriend, but arranges for age-appropriate pairings by the end. I can't say whether whisky fueled the writing here, as it was often supposed to have in Coburn's later career, but there's an energy here missing in most of the other stories. I'm thinking of two pieces that hardly have business in a pulp magazine. In Elmer Ransom's "With Work to Do," a disgraced, widowed doctor befriends an injured beaver and spoils the animal until it's ostracized by its own kind, only to be inspired when the beaver mans up and takes charge in a crisis caused by the man himself. Don Tracy's "Bunny Rabbits" is inexcusable slop in which a newspaper circulation stunt offering rabbits as incentives to newsboys goes haywire. I guess the slicks wouldn't have these stories, but they seemed respectable to Argosy. Stuff like them was helping to kill the venerable weekly, on top of Munsey's self-destructive overexpansion over the last two or three years. For the next two Tuesdays we'll continue to follow Tarzan's misadventure and see if anything else is salvageable from these dark days for Argosy.

THE PULP CALENDAR: March 12

This 1932 Argosy marked Tarzan's return to the venerable weekly after eight years. Argosy, of course, was the sister publication and heir to the All-Story where the Ape Man made his very first appearance in 1912. For most of his history, Tarzan swung back and forth between the Munsey pulps (All-Story and Argosy) and the McCall story magazines, Blue Book and Red Book. Edgar Rice Burroughs presumably went with the highest bidder each time; he'd take Tarzan back to Blue Book later in 1932, and in 1933 the Ape Man would finally appear in a slick, that being Liberty. Tarzan would return to Argosy in 1936, 1938 and 1941. Burroughs placed a lot of other stories in the weekly in between.

I'm at a bit of a loss with the rest of the issue because the Fiction Mags Index doesn't know what's in it, and no one seems to be selling a copy with an interest in listing the contents. We can at least figure out the other serials by looking at the previous and subsequent issues. This number features part two of Thomson Burtis's Texas air serial, Soldiers of the Storm, and part four of F. V. W. Mason's Captain Renegade. A quick flurry of research revealed that sci-fi pioneer Murray Leinster has a story this week called "Nemesis." Beyond that, we have a "Camel Corps" novelette and a "South Seas" novelette. "Camel Corps" may mean Foreign Legion, and that may mean Robert Carse or J. D. Newsom, though if it were Georges Surdez I think they'd mention him on the cover. "South Seas" could well mean my man Bellow Bill Williams, but there were a lot of South Seas specialists. For now,the only way to find out may be to buy a copy, but with Tarzan on the cover it would definitely cost you.

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 9

Pulps are cheap compared to Golden Age comics, but you'll pay a pretty penny or two for this 1937 issue of Argosy. One reason is obvious: this issue starts an Edgar Rice Burroughs serial. Burroughs bounced back and forth between Argosy and Blue Book in these years and his presence in an issue always jacks up prices. The other reason this particular issue will cost you is that L. Ron Hubbard, a writer with quite the cult following, has a short story inside. A lot of Hubbard's early pulp stuff has been put back into print in recent years and it's usually fairly entertaining. Yet another legendary pulpster waits inside: Johnston McCulley, the creator of Zorro -- probably the second most famous pulp creation after Burroughs's Tarzan -- continues the enticingly-titled serial "Wench Caravan." The other serial is "Baby Face," a boxing story by air-story specialist George Bruce, who not so long before had whole magazines named after him. I've only read a couple of stories by Bruce, but they're good enough to make me believe he really earned that honor. I sort of resent Burroughs's presence here because the following week's issue has a Robert Carse novella, but the next chapter of ERB's serial makes the issue more expensive than I'd like. One of the reasons my Argosy collection is concentrated in the 1934-35 period (as you'll see eventually) is that Burroughs isn't around to inflate those issues' prices.