THE PULP CALENDAR: September 29

Little more than a week before this 1934 Argosy marked its anniversary on this blog, a member of the Yahoo pulpscans group uploaded a complete scan of it. Back in July, Foreign Legion fan and blogger Jack Wagner uploaded a scan of the issue's best story, Georges Surdez' "Military Prisoner." As there's no table of contents for this one in the FictionMags Index, it's my cultural duty to give you the original.

F. Van Wyck Mason's cover story is a typical pulp redemption tale. An American doctor is ruined professionally and socially after his performing euthanasia on a wealthy patient, at her request, is exposed and denounced. He becomes a hard-luck trader deep in darkest Africa, when who should show up looking for guides but his enemy and his former beloved. I think you can take it from there, but it's entertaining enough. Calling it a "Complete Novel" at 38 pages is a stretch, but Argosy was flexible about type size in its effort at this time to cram as much content into 144 pages as possible, and "River Raiders" is satisfyingly dense. Nevertheless, "Military Prisoners" takes the honors this issue, as an Surdez story is likely to do. The real disappointment here is the concluding chapter of W. Wirt's The Assassin, the last appearance of Jimmie Cordie and his merry mercenaries, thought they'd make at least one encore appearance in Short Stories the following year. In this three-parter,  Japanese conspirators hope to provoke a break between the U.S, and their country by having an American gangster assassinate Henry "The Last Emperor" Pu-yi, their puppet head of state in Manchuria.The main problem with the story is that Cordie and his band are so invincible by now that Wirt can't maintain any suspense. More than ever, the serial seems like an excuse for Wirt to indulge in the vaudeville shtick of those aggressively ethnic antagonists, Irish Red Dolan and the self-dubbed "Fighting Yid." I've liked the other Cordie stories I've read, but it was sad to read this. For most contemporary readers the real highlight was more likely the new installment of A. Merritt's long-awaited serial Creep, Shadow!, reviving his characters from Burn, Witch, Burn! I've never read any Merritt despite his great reputation as a fantasist, but I found this installment of his last major work pretty interesting. The rest of the issue is okay, and I'll reserve comment on J. E. Grinsted's The Kid From Hell until next week. For now, this issue of Argosy is sponsored by:

THE PULP CALENDAR: June 15

This 1935 Argosy is available for story-by-story download at unz.org. By this time F. V. W. Mason had been a star writer for the weekly for several years. His serials and occasional long novelettes were almost guaranteed to get the cover.  His "powerful novel of the time of Alexander the Great" is Lysander of Chios, later published in paperback as plain old Lysander. There's an almost mock-epic quality to this opening installment. Chios is a Greek island that has been ravaged and impoverished by generations of Persian attacks. Lysander, the young king, intends to send an expedition against Persia, consisting only of himself and the crew of his one humble warship. He's aided by the one-eyed Theban mercenary Conon and -- quite against Lysander's will -- by the runaway tomboy princess of Naxos, Kyria. The fight between Conon and Kyria, the two loose cannons, is one of this first episode's highlights. In grand pulp fashion Kyria is a legit warrior woman, if not quite Conon's equal in strength and combat cunning than at least a pretty devastating archer from what we see here. This little band will have plenty of room to maneuver, since the Great King will find himself preoccupied by Alexander's large-scale invasion. Mason gives his heroes more colloquial dialogue than you might expect in this sort of story, presumably befitting their small-time status. It freshens up the material, and the potential conflicts (and romance) among the characters makes you want to continue the story. It worked for me, since I now have the next four installments in my personal collection. You can go back to unz.org for the conclusion.

The long story this issue is J. Allan Dunn's "Goblin Trail." It's the sort of story people think of when they think of "pulp" in the pre-Tarantino sense of the word: fantastic to an increasingly delirious degree. You get the sense that Dunn is making it up as he goes along, piling up the crazy details.  A Mountie and his faithful Eskimo constable on a Grand Patrol encounter a degenerate Indian tribe performing barbaric rituals to exorcise devils. The Indians tell them of an "Evil One" lurking in the region "back of beyond." Our heroes begin to suspect that the Evil One is real when they find an old trader murdered. He is real, and like the villain he is he kidnaps the white girl of the story in order to make her his queen. Dunn diagnoses the case:

His dementia had doubtless been inherent, now arrived at the phase of 'ambitious' paranoia. a supreme and fixed belief in a noble destiny, a determination to acquire it that swept aside all obstacles. As with the subjects of most forms of paranoia, he was inclined to crimes of violence and extreme cruelty. his mind was diseased and could not be ministered to.

The hunt for the Evil One would be story enough, but you can understand if pulp writers start doubting whether they've put enough story into a story. And so, like King Kong fighting dinosaurs on Skull Island, the Evil One has to defend his captive from a lost colony of Vikings, and their lost colony is on the brink of destruction by eruption and earthquake. It all sounds nutty but there's something almost irresistible about the naive enthusiasm with which Dunn keeps adding to his tale. It makes up a little for the now-glaring racism of Dunn's treatment of the Indians. The heroic Eskimo fares much better, although Dunn, getting carried away, has a hard time keeping track of the way Ooingoot talks. He starts out talking typical pulp pidgin, but grows so much more articulate later that Dunn realizes he has to explain the discrepancy by noting that "on occasion" his English improves due to mission-school training. But for all Ooingoot's virtues, he and his kind are doomed to a social-darwinist destiny. "Soon they will be finished -- what you call washed up," he laments, and the Mountie can only agree, since "He felt that the advent of the white race inevitably meant the passing of the native. The two could not blend. Traces might linger. It was the survival of the fittest." Fittingly, Ooingoot sacrifices himself in the final showdown with the Evil One and the Vikings, though you can't help feeling he deserved better. As long as you know to expect this sort of thing going in, you'll find "Goblin Trail" appealingly goofy in its straight-faced, sometimes overwrought manner.

That leaves us with Ared White's novelette "The Courier from Spa," the sort of spy story in which he apparently specialized. White also specialized in this kind of writing: "Elton's quick aim had the element of calculating deliberation that a trained marksman, in contained possession of his faculties, measures into the veriest instant." That explains how he shot a guy. Despite White, this is a pretty strong issue when you add in the conclusion of Borden Chase's Heading Boss and  the continuation of Hulbert Footner's Sink of Iniquity. Hapsburg Liebe's "The Secret Room" has its heroes fend off a lynching bee; as usual in such stories the intended victim is white. And in Arthur Hawthorne Carhart's "Beginner's Luck" the heroes apparently fend off an avalanche. I'm not sure how Dunn forgot to put one of those in his story.

VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: F. Van Wyck Mason, CAPTAIN JUDAS (1931-55)

When paperback books -- or pocket books, to distinguish them from bulkier 21st century paperbacks -- supplanted pulp magazines,  pulp writers outside the detective and science fiction genres had to satisfy an appetite for novels rather than short stories or novelettes. For many pulp veterans there was an easy way to satisfy this demand: convert old serials into novels. That's what F.V.W. Mason, already a busy novelist in the historical adventure and spy stories, did with the many serials he published in Argosy. Captain Judas, for instance, appeared exactly 85 years ago in the venerable weekly.

Pocket Books assures us that "This edition of Captain Judas was completely rewritten" by Mason, who clearly took advantage of the opportunity to make the language slightly saltier with a few "bastards" and at least one "son of a bitch." The Pocket Books edition seems just a little large for a pocket book at 234 pages, but Mason might not have needed to add too much to a six-part serial.

Amos Trent is a rugged American sea captain during the Jefferson administration with a grudge against the family who set him up to be court-martialed and dropped by the U.S. Navy, while pining for the family's beauteous daughter, Dorothea Sayles. He's manipulated into fighting a duel with Dorothea's brother in the middle of a high-society soiree, and the slight wound he suffers gives rival captain Arnold Estes a head start on a big payday with a much-wanted shipment of sugar. Trent tries to catch up but is burdened by unexpected passengers: Dorothea, her friend Sally Severn and Sally's banker father. While Dorothea is refined and retiring, all beauty but little brain -- her nickname is "Dodo" -- Sally is vivacious, hoydenish and witty, and her Paris fashions look like "near nudity" to the unsophisticated Trent. Still, he finds herself warming to her as she shows grace under increasing pressure. Trent's ship is beset first by the British Navy, seeking alleged deserters to impress, and then by the dread Barbary Pirates, who capture the ship with intent to enslave the surviving crew and passengers. Dodo and Sally are doomed to the harem unless Trent can convince the mirant, a Scots renegade turned Muslim corsair, to hold them for ransom in defiance of the local bashaw's will. The women are subjected to the ultimate humiliation of being paraded around naked, but Sally takes it like a trouper, while cowardly, selfish Dodo leaps at the chance to become the wife of the odious Arnold Estes who, also captured, sells out to the Muslims, converts and is made an officer. Trent, whom Estes framed for selling out an escape attempt, decides that since his people already see him as "Captain Judas," that he may as well convert himself as the only way to save Sally from transport to Constantinople. The odd thing here is that wild Sally finds that a step too far -- not that Trent doesn't feel guilty as sin himself. "What chance of the least happiness would we have, with me knowing you'd denied your God for me and you knowing I made you do it?" she protests. Not to worry: Amos Trent still has an exit strategy for both of them....

Captain Judas is to a degree a riff on Rafael Sabatini's The Sea Hawk -- not to be confused with the virtually unrelated Errol Flynn film of the same name -- in its focus on a Christian who turns renegade Muslim corsair. The story, with its dread of conversion, probably has fresh resonance in the 21st century, and may serve as a corrective in spirit to a more recent paradigm that portrays pirates and corsairs as a kind of primitive egalitarian democracy in which religion matters little. Authentic Muslims actually figure little in the story, as our hero deals mostly with the Scots renegade, who gives Mason an opportunity to play with dialect more, unsatisfied, presumably, with having given Trent a Scots sidekick. Modern readers find dialect of any sort repellent but, for good or ill, it was part of the music, so to speak, of pulp fiction, and Scots dialect, at least, isn't as stigmatizing as other possibilities. For the record, the Sayles family has a black butler but Mason goes a little easy on his dialect and fortunately the butler doesn't get much to say. Returning to Islam, Mason avoids casting aspersions on the faith itself, having Trent note while studying for his conversion that "it was the human distortion of Mohammedism that had made it a hateful creed, as the Inquisition had twisted Christianity into a grim mockery of its intended philosophy." The hate is real in the story, however, and readers today may be less inclined to dismiss it as a pejorative "Orientalist" fantasy -- though on the other hand the more likely you are to know what "Orientalism" is, the more likely you may be to see it everywhere. Enough of academia, though: the main point of this novel is exotic action, and Mason delivers the goods, from an early riot that menaces poor Dodo to the later naval action. He writes in an easy, readable style that makes Captain Judas an acceptable page turner. I have more Mason in my pulp collection, including most of his irreverent Macedonian serial Lysander of Chios (1935), and on the strength of Judas I'll be on the lookout for his novels in the used-book stores I haunt both locally and farther afield.