'Always a German, but only since sunrise an enemy'

L. Patrick Greene's "One Man's Flag" (Adventure, March 15, 1931) is a bit of sentimental hogwash set in South Africa at the outbreak of World War I. "Papa" Haydn is the founder and patriarch of the little community of Williamstown, where nearly everyone is English, but when war breaks out between England and Germany in Europe, the old man remembers his heritage and an obligation to treat his neighbors as enemies. Despite his patriotic conscience, he can't generate very much hatred toward them, and they find his hostile gestures mostly amusing. At first, when he raises a German flag upon hearing of the war, the neighbors think he's simply made a typical old man's mistake. Soon enough, they realize that he knows full well what flag he's raised, but they still find it hard to hold that against him, in part because Haydn, old and fat, is effectively harmless. They have to rescue him from foolhardy attempts to link up with German forces in the wild, but all seem satisfied to let him carry on his old business despite theoretically being a prisoner of war. Given the ethnic tensions that must have existed from the Boer War to 1914, this all seems far too good to be true, especially when you read of how Germany's enemies effectively whipped up hysterical hatred toward ethnic Germans in their midst -- but maybe it was different in South Africa. In any event, when Haydn's shop is appropriated by Allied forces as a temporary command center for Gen. Jan Christian Smuts, the old man sees a final opportunity to serve his native country by informing the Germans of the enemy commander's position and plans. On the way, however, he rescues a lone British homesteader family he'd befriended long before from an attack by a band of native marauders, getting himself mortally injured in the process. His neighbors humor the old man to the bittersweet end, with the military getting in the act as all pretend to award the dying Haydn the Iron Cross. This was already a nauseatingly heartwarming story before the climax with its implication that black Africans, not English or Germans, are the real enemy. I know that wasn't an article of faith for Greene, who created one of pulp's best black characters in The Major's sidekick, Jim the Hottentot. But the more the main story seemed too good to be believable, the more the business with the natives seemed obnoxious if not offensive. No doubt, too, that Greene meant well, and that by 1931 the argument that English and Germans shouldn't be enemies was probably well received. By today's standards, however, "One Man's Flag" is probably too idealistic and at the same time not idealistic enough.

'He's utterly amoral, Yank, if you know what that means.'

In "The Bond of Bully Haines" (Adventure, February 1, 1930), L. Patrick Greene grapples with the allure of the antihero, the outlaw with a code, and maybe confesses more than he meant to. The title character, a "recruiter" who raids African villages for forced labor, is seen from the conflicted perspective of an American narrator who eventually joins the Rhodesian police force. The narrator introduces himself getting rolled by "Yellow Rose," a mixed-race prostitute, and her "dago" boyfriend in Portuguese-ruled Lourenco Marques. They beat him up again when he wakes up and wants his money back, but his rage against them vanishes when Bully Haines, just out of prison, appears in the dive to fulfill an earlier vow of revenge. Greene sets the ambivalent tone by having Haines arrive with a beam of sunlight flashing through the doorway into the dark dive. The narrator sees the denizens cowering as if they fear the light itself, as if they're vampires. He soon realizes that Haines may be a worse monster than any of them. He vowed to kill the dago and disfigure Yellow Rose for having ratted him out to the authorities, and the narrator watches in horror as he carries out his vow. Forgetting his own grievance, he tries to rescue Rose, only to be flung aside by Haines. Yet when a group of "dago" policemen arrive to arrest "Bloody Haines," our hero feels an impulse to defend him. He's dangerously fascinated by the idea that Haines always keeps his word. Told by a friend that Haines has "never been known to go back on that," the narrator goes off on a racial rhapsody.

"He must be a real white man, then," I said, thinking of the men of the West I'd known -- square, honest, law abiding men whose word was their bond. But Doc looked at me queerly. And he said:
"It all depends, doesn't it, on what sort of word he gives? But he said he'd mark Yellow Rose. He said he'd kill Pedro. And he did. He's utterly amoral, Yank, if you know what that means. And, if you're wise, you'll never get in his path...."

Yet he can't help admiring the way Haines sweeps up the head policeman and spanks him in front of everyone, fifty slaps for the fifty lashes he took in prison. He can't help not liking it when two more policemen skulk toward Haines to hamstring him with their knives.

Say, I couldn't sit there an' see that happen. Maybe there ain't no justification for what I did. Well, what of it? I ain't looking for justification; not in this world anyway. Maybe Bully Haines was a murderer, an' all the things I've since learnt about him, an' deserved what looked like coming to him. Maybe, I say. But I didn't stop to consider anything like that. He was, as I saw it, then, a white man, an' white men have got to stick together.

Our hero puts Haines in his debt by his intervention, though Bully naturally boasts that he could have taken care of all the cops himself. As this is a pulp story, you can guess pretty confidently that Haines will repay his debt, no matter how evil he's shown to be in the narrator's own judgment. The Texan is a casual racist himself, routinely using the dreaded n-word to describe the people of Africa, but he tells us that he came to like and respect many Africans -- "They can teach a white man a lot if he's willing to learn" -- while on the evidence of his antagonist's atrocities "I reckoned Bully Haines didn't think of niggers as people. He couldn't have done things that way, else." As an officer of the law he's sincerely dedicated to hunting down and destroying Haines.

And yet, when a moment comes when it looks like Africans are going to carry out vigilante justice against Haines, most likely the slow, spectacular way, our narrator reverts back to the form he showed in the Lourenco Marques dive. He has the drop on Haines when a vigilante leader charges in.

I shifted my aim. God knows why. I'd got nothing against the nigger. He was going to do what I hadn't the nerve to do. An' yet, seems like I've only had one creed knocked into me ever since I was knee high to a yearling. White men must stick together. I ain't trying to justify myself. I'm stating facts. I shifted my aim, an' the nigger fell.

It's as if, in L. Patrick Greene's mind, some race-instinct in some way makes all whites, or all self-conscious whites, complicit in the crimes of the worst by refusing to make them accountable to their victims. Of course, this is also the standard pulp trope you see most often in westerns when whites must convince Indians that white villains who've wronged them must be left to white man's law. The implicit argument often is that aboriginal peoples are too inclined to carry justice to sadistic excess, but back of that is some fundamental if not instinctual (according to pulp thinking) refusal of accountability to the other. Suffice it to say, of course, that Haines rewards our hero's impulse of solidarity by remembering the debt he owes the man, which our hero himself claims to have forgotten. Our hero and his men are in the path of indiscriminate vengeance, but Haines negotiates their safe withdrawal on the condition that he will return to accept the vigilante tribesmen's justice. They accept the deal, and our hero assumes that Haines will renege. Haines even says so, but this turns out to be a necessary lie to get our hero out of harm's way, after which, with our hero unable to stop him, Bully Haines recrosses the river to keep his last word.

In the end, Greene makes his narrator admirably inarticulate. Haines was "A bloody villain, if there ever was one. But wasn't he something else, too? I dunno! This blasted jungle fever fogs a man's judgment." I'm not sure Greene himself really reconciled the ambiguity, but he may not have though it possible. It all put me in mind of the scene in The Wild Bunch when William Holden argues with Ernest Borgnine over Robert Ryan's siding with the railroad detectives hunting them. Holden rejects Borgnine's vilification of their old friend, reminding Borgnine that Ryan had given his word to his new employer. Borgnine answers that it's not your word that matters, but who you give it to. With Bully Haines, you have to ask why it should matter that he keeps his word when you consider everything else he does. For the narrator, keeping one's word is "white," but to admire Haines for keeping his word is pretty much to betray the narrator's own principles as they've evolved over his time in Africa. You might ask how likely it is for as unprincipled a person as Bully Haines to keep his word consistently, but to question that premise probably misses the real point. From the "crime does not pay" standpoint, the idea of the outlaw who lives by a code is a dangerous illusion, or an excuse to admire utterly undeserving characters. In the case of Bully Haines, admiration for an outlaw's code seems even more like an excuse to avoid a necessary reckoning, even as Greene and the narrator recognize explicitly that Haines is as much a product of an oppressive system as he is an original sinner. Speaking for myself, those stories where the officer has to protect the white outlaw from the angry natives never really ring true. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd let the people with the grievance have those bastards.

'When the bird flies away -- when the monkey drinks.'

L. Patrick Greene returns to Africa with "The Impertinence of M'Hoy," (January 30, 1926), one of his weaker contributions to Adventure. The problem with this one, I think, is that Greene is trying to tell two stories at once: one about the attempted uprising of the titular Matabele chieftain, the other about the pig-headed naivete of Resident Native Commissioner Percival "Reverend Percy" Roe. The latter's offense seems to be that he doesn't understand that the only thing some Africans understand is force. He's not exactly an anti-imperialist; Roe never questions Britain's right to colonize Africa, and he rather enjoys the flattery he receives from wily rogues like M'Hoy. But he shares with today's stereotypical "bleeding heart" anti-imperialist a belief in the essential innocence of his "dear black brothers," and that puts him at odds with the real hero of the story, Trooper Beamish, whom Roe presumes to be a racist ("You are the sort of man who refers to natives as niggers and has nothing but contemptuous hate for our black fellow subjects") because he doesn't trust M'Hoy's intentions and conducted a forcible search of the chief's kraal. Beamish is not the sort of dirty-mouthed racist Roe imagines; he gets on quite well with his own well-disciplined black troops, who share his contempt for Roe, -- he halfheartedly reminds them that the RNC it "the voice of the Great Queen," and is told, "He is her voidance of wind, more like," -- and his hunch about M'Hoy is quite correct. The action of the story is his labored effort to make Roe see the light of M'Hoy's darkness. His plan requires his own men to swallow their pride and accept the insults of M'Hoy's people. They balk at the idea until he explains to his corporal, "Have you ever seen a bird play lame in order to lure a snake away from her nest? Have you never seen a crocodile float like a rotten log on the top of the water until a foolish monkey approached to drink?" It's a fairly common trope of imperialist pulp that natives can defer gratification once convinced that doing so is part of a game or contest, and so thinking Beamish's men are willing to go along with his scheme until the time "when the bird flies away -- when the monkey drinks." The payoff is underwhelming: Beamish finally goads M'Hoy into attacking him and his men at a time when Roe is visiting his camp and will see the Matabele's illegal weapons, at a time when M'Hoy knows that Roe is nearby. This seems stupid after we've seen M'Hoy boast to Beamish that he'd always be able to convince "the fat white man" of his innocence. In fact, M'Hoy has conveniently explained all of his plans to Beamish, assuming (as villains will) that our hero won't be able to do anything about it. But Beamish hardly has to do anything so long as M'Hoy acts so quickly, and on such feeble pretext, to undermine his own strategy. It hardly matters, since the only point of the story is to wise up some fool about native wickedness, yet the story ends on a cynical, pessimistic note. Beamish believes that "Roe has had a little sense knocked into him" by his experience, but Beamish's superior is doubtful. as Greene writes, "He knew the breed."

'When a puny fool gives orders, inkosi, what can men do but laugh?'

L. Patrick Greene is best known now for his series of pulp stories about "The Major" and his sidekick Jim the Hottentot, but on the side he was the Georges Surdez of British imperialism in Africa. That is, Greene wrote a good number of stories dealing with the challenge of military discipline amid the clash of personalities in a military and colonial hierarchy. "Discipline" (Adventure, March 30, 1926) is an obvious case in point. Simmons, our protagonist, is tasked with whipping the Black Watch of the British South African Police into shape. They're an awkward squad, inconsistently uniformed and clumsy in half-hearted drill with that inattention to cleanliness than considered characteristic of nonwhite peoples. Simmons gives them a stern talking to, breaking their complacency to remold them into some semblance of soldiery.

'Pigs!' he ejaculated. 'Pigs!' he said again, very slowly, as his finger traveled down the line.
The men stiffened perceptibly.
'You do not like to be called pigs, eh?' Simmons said with a harsh laugh. 'Then you must have pride and you are not altogether lost to shame. And yet --' the men squirmed under the lashing sarcasm of his voice -- 'I should have called you buloyi; I should have pointed my first finger at you. But, see how merciful I am, I only call you pigs.'
A cloud of dust arose from their embarrassed scuffling.
'You are liars, all of you,' Simmons continued in an even, unimpassioned voice. 'By your mouths you proclaim yourselves to be men and warriors of the great white chief, but by the filthiness in which you live it is plain that you are no men. No. Not men, but brothers to the dog-apes. Tchat! I spit your filth from me! I weep for you.'

This has a positive effect because many of the men do have warriors' pride and they are capable of shame, even if they want to blame their lax ways on their corporal, whom they disdain as a "puny fool." They respond well to harsh drilling, but a busybody English missionary, Banning, doesn't like what he sees when Simmons sends his men charging through a patch of thorns. The missionary, one of a brother-sister team, is determined to have Simmons written up for brutality. Greene wants us to recognize Banning as a naive idealist; the one thing he doesn't understand, it seems, is force. He doesn't take Simmons seriously when the officer warns that the missionary has hired porters from a hostile tribe, and sure enough, the tribe ends up kidnapping Banning's sister with intent to sacrifice her to one of their gods. "The curs! And I treated them like friends!" Banning protests.

The payoff reminds us that Greene was the creator of one of the more consistently heroic black characters in pulp in Jim the Hottentot. When the time comes to carry out a rescue mission, Simmons is prostrated by fever, and it's up to the Black Watch, including the "puny" corporal, to vindicate their commander's methods and his ultimate faith in them as men. Their mission, Simmons says, is "only another lesson in discipline. For us as well as them." The Black Watch, it turns out, has new pride in their imperial role. "Our voices are the voices of all white men," their top man tells the hostiles. In the face of the enemy's defiance, they ford a deep river, scatter their foes with disciplined, non-lethal fire and rescue Miss Banning. For some modern readers, the climax might reveal the Black Watch as tragic sellouts, brainwashed by the British, but Greene obviously had a different intention: to show that Africans were capable, if not of civilization as whites knew it, then of that discipline that arguably forms the foundation of any civilization. In short, "Discipline" is meant as a positive, if patronizing, portrait of black men, whatever people may think of it nearly a century later.

'You, Baas, are like the man who makes his hut a refuge for mombas'

The most successful 'white hunter' character in pulp fiction set in Africa was L. Patrick Greene's creation Aubrey St. John Major, better known simply as "The Major." Greene created the Major and his sidekick, Jim the Hottentot, for Adventure in late 1919. In 1921 they all moved to Short Stories, where the Major became a fixture, with possibly the most covers of any character in that magazine, for the next quarter-century. Strictly speaking, the Major is a good bad man or lovable rogue, wanted by the colonial authorities in his earliest adventures for illegal diamond buying but typically targeting men worse than himself. He evolved into a more standard good guy troubleshooter over time, while Jim evolved from something close to comic relief to one of the more rounded black characters in all pulp. Greene was conscious of his characters' evolution and made them conscious of it as well. In "Major Sacrifice," (Short Stories, January 25, 1939) Jim remarks that he once would have been fooled like the story's Zulu antagonists by the Major using his monocle like a magical "third eye" that can tell truth from lies. At the same time, Jim still feels a slight dread whenever he looks at a photograph. "We black ones are crammed with foolish fears," he reflects, "That is why white men impose their will upon us so easily." For all that, Jim has an exceptional relationship with his baas that allows for considerable criticism of what the Hottentot sees as the Major's misplaced idealism. Jim is deferential without being servile, and the dialogue between the two characters is sometimes the most interesting part of a Major story. Here's an exchange from "Major Sacrifice" in which they debate what to do about two disreputable characters trailing them on the veldt. The protagonists speak in Jim's dialect, allowing Jim full articulation of his thoughts.

"If they follow us, Jim."
"Oh, but they do, Baas. You know they do. I have shown them to you. Two men on horseback, Baas, each leading a pack horse. You have seen them. You have seen their campfires. They are clever, too. They know the veldt. Always they keep a day's trek behind us and ride so cunningly that none can see them."
"Yet you saw them, Jim."
"Ah, yes, Baas," the Hottentot said with simple conceit, "but I am not an ordinary man."
"By jove, you're not," the Major drawled in English.
"Golly, damme, no," Jim chuckled.

***
"And so they are evil as i said. Their purpose -- as concerning us and him -- is evil."
"That is my fear, Jim," the Major admitted.
"Ou, Baas. Then why did you not let me go back and kill them as I desired. Wo-we! It is not too late. let me go back now. In the night's darkness I will reach their outspan. for them there will be no pain -- that I promise. I will only lengthen their sleep into death. But of course," he continued sarcastically, "that is not the way of white men. Most assuredly it is not your way. You, Baas, you are like the man who makes his hut a refuge for mombas, though he well knows that by so doing he endangers his own life. Why do not white men kill their enemies?"
"The evil ones do, Jim. The others refrain -- partly, I think, because they fear to destroy what they cannot create."
"Wu! That is folly, Baas. Men can create men -- else the world would now be empty. To kill an enemy is nothing, Baas. Death is nothing. No more than the snuffing out of a flame. And it's better, i say, to snuff out one flame that lights a hut than to permit it to grow into a big fire which will destory a kraal." Jim shook his head in mock reproach and then continued, "But perhaps the evil spirits of the waste lands will deal with those two evil men. Yet even that you will prevent if  you can. You -- how well I know you, Baas -- will risk your own life, if necessary, in order to save them."

While Jim can be very frank talking with the Major, Greene reminds us that they're not equals, though his conceit is that Jim, rather than the Major, enforces the limits of their friendship. Shortly after this exchange, Jim observes, almost self-mockingly, that "My only pleasure is to serve you." The Major counters, "What is this talk of service, Jim," and places his hand on the Hottentot's shoulder in "a gesture of friendship and protection." The Major may well see Jim as his friend in some truly egalitarian way, but Jim returns the sentiment with eyes that "glowed with the light of devotion and service." And even if Jim is right to chide the Major later for allowing evil to enter the story's happy valley, you get the sense that Jim himself recognizes that his Baas's sentiments are not contemptible foolishness but the idealism of a higher being.

The story as a whole is far less progressive than Greene's portrayal of Jim. The Major has been hired by a fiftysomething English woman to track down her husband, Henry Grey, believed lose in Africa. Her intentions become clear when she offers our hero 5,000 pounds for Henry's signature on a document, and 10,000 pounds for proof of his death. The other two trackers come into the story when Mrs. Grey learns from local gossip that the Major is not as unscrupulous as he himself had led her to believe. As for Henry Grey, "his true environment was an English suburb," but the Major and Jim recognize him from a photo provided by Mrs. Grey as the man who, under the name of "Kind Heart," somehow became the chief of a band of refugee Zulus and others living in a hidden "Happy Valley."  The situation is so preposterous -- Greene presumably has Lost Horizon and similar stories in mind -- that he can barely explain how it came about, other than to offer that Grey "knew his people. He could speak as they spoke. He could think as they thought. And that ability is the hallmark of white men who are successful in their work with natives." Unsurprisingly, some restless young men of the makeshift tribe chafe under Kind Heart's control, goaded by a pretentious would-be warrior whose refrain, "By the blood of Chaka!" is tiresome even to his own comrades. This gives our heroes an additional set of antagonists to worry about, but you probably can guess that everything works out all right in the end, the Major becoming an intermediary in a long-distance divorce proceeding after the Happy Valley elders beat sense into the rebellious youths. As a story "Major Sacrifice" is one of the sillier entries that I've read in the series, but the series as a whole remains fascinating to discover bit by bit as Altus Press prepares a complete edition and more scanned issues of Short Stories come on line. Look for more of the Major and Jim on this blog in the future.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 15

This is a 1931 Adventure from my own collection. I don't think it's an intact copy; my understanding is that in this era you had an advertising section before the table of contents that, if such was still the case in 1931, has been cut away. Still, the content that counts is intact, though I don't think I'd risk cracking the 192 page magazine's spine to do any serious scanning. I've only read about a third of the issue so far, and the stories are pretty good.

In this era Adventure's covers rarely if ever illustrated any of the stories inside, but you could imagine that Sidney Riesenberg's cover is a portrait of Hashknife Hartley, W. C. Tuttle's most enduring western hero. Hashknife's career began in Adventure in 1920, and there he stayed, for the most part, until 1935, apart from a few forays into Argosy. From 1935 to 1951 Hashknife was a star of Short Stories, though Tuttle created a kind of poor man's version of the team of Hashknife and Sleepy Stevens for Exciting Western's Tombstone and Speedy series in the 1940s. The original Hashknife was the exemplar of Tuttle's pulp specialty, the cowboy detective, though the author is at pains to deny pretentious claims for his hero's genius in this introduction to him (or reintroduction) from this issue's opening installment of the two-parter The Make-Believe Man.

Hashknife was no super-sleuth of the range country, but he did have a keen mind and a keen eye for small details, together with a bulldog tenacity. He was a product of the cattle range on the Milk River, Montana; the son of an intinerant minister who had almost too many sons and daughters to share his pittance. So little Henry Hartley, with only a smattering of education, went into the world to win a living.

He grew up quickly, both physically and mentally, a student of human nature, a crude analyst of things. Drifting down through the cattle country, he stopped for a while at the famous old ranch that gave him his nickname, and there he met Dave – Sleepy – Stevens, another cowboy with an itchy foot.

The other side of the hills called to both of them, and they rode away together, just a pair of vagabond cowboys.

And many a rangeland had passed under their horses’ feet since that day, and many a hill had seen them go up one side and down the other. It had not been a profitable partnership. Right now they had less money than they had the day they rode away together, but behind them were deeds well done and memories that money could not buy.

 
In this story Hashknife tries to solve the killing of a fellow saddletramp he knows to have been a real, professional range detective, along the way embroiling himself and Sleepy in the family drama of a woman whose son robbed her, supposedly to pay off a gambling debt, and whose daughter-in-law still lives with her. To Hashknife that doesn't add up; someone that low wouldn't pay any sort of debt. Where he goes with that insight I won't know until I see the October 1 issue someday.

Fortunately there are several satisfactory stories complete in this issue. The best so far is L. Patrick Greene's "Justice," surprisingly frank in its acknowledgment of the sexual exploitation of African women, often the wives of colonial troops, by British officers. The story's hero has the hard-earned respect of his Black Watch, former Zulu warriors, but has to take extra steps to defend their honor after forbidding them from killing the African orderlies who act as procurers for the predatory British. Just as Greene's portrayal of Jim the Hottentot in his Major series evolved over time so that Jim was virtual co-hero of some stories, so here, despite some inevitable racism, he sympathetically portrays the Black Watch's demand for respect as men. I like that Greene resorts to that old pulp standby, the white man's charm that supposedly will detect a guilty party, only to blow right past that point where other stories climax to get to the meat of his subject.

Also very good is "First Command," by Jacland Marmur. A writer I discovered in unz.org's collection of Collier's Weekly, Marmur was pulp's answer to Joseph Conrad: a native of Poland who wrote sea stories in English. This one sets up a cliched situation of two young officers whose lifelong rivalry is punctuated by fistfights in every shared port of call, who end up getting their first posts or serious responsibility on the same ship. When disaster strikes almost instantly, the rivalry vanishes almost as instantly as the men's professionalism comes to the fore.

The last story I read before deadline was L. G. Blochman's "Monsoon." It's well-written but misguided, as Blochman is more interested in the British officer facing criticism from an impatient colonial elite than in his improbable and thus automatically more interesting antagonist, a Canadian World War I veteran who inspires a native uprising. We simply don't learn enough about this man apart from an idealistic belief in liberty that defies the officer's experienced cynicism. It's not that the officer doubts that Indians want liberty; it's just that he knows them to be peasants first who'll revert to peasant ways at the first opportunity, which he strives to provide to them. Maybe it's just my anti-imperialist bias talking (despite my fascination with imperialist stories), but the real story just has to be how the Canadian forms his army, but still finds time for friendly games of chess with the officer.

Coming up for me are Hugh Pendexter's novelette "No Man's Land," about Quantrill's Raiders; Raymond Spears' western story "The Nester;" Gordon Carroll's "story of the tanks" "The Gunner's Seat;" Andrew A Caffrey's "The Fishing Was Good;" another memoir from globetrotting soldier of fortune Rafael de Nogales, and the conclusion of Ared White's Napoleonic serial Monsieur Le Falcon. I really look forward to the Pendexter, but even if the rest aren't up to the standard set in the early pages this issue is still a treat already.

It was inexcusable of me not to credit this issue's sponsor:

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 25

I don't want to waste a Calendar entry on a 1941 Argosy -- instead, I'm going to give that thing a post of its own -- so here's a 1939 Short Stories featuring one of that pulp's most popular characters. L. Patrick Greene's Aubrey St. John Major -- the middle name is pronounced "Syngen" but he's usually called "The Major" -- actually began life in Adventure in 1919 before moving to Short Stories in 1921, while Greene continued to write other stories for Adventure. Pulp publishers didn't claim to own characters on any consistent basis, apart from those who had books named after them, so authors could move characters where he could get better a deal for them. Tarzan, for instance, bounced back and forth between Argosy and Blue Book depending on which would pay Edgar Rice Burroughs better. As for The Major, he was sort of a good-bad man in Africa, usually wanted for illegal diamond buying but often pitting himself against far worse characters. His sidekick was Jim the Hottentot, who called Major his baas and was prone to stock-African phrases like "wowee!" but evolved over time into a pretty heroic character in his own right. Elsewhere in this issue, Gordon Young's Red Clark also got his start in Adventure, but all but two of his serial adventures appeared in Short Stories, while Gene Van's Red Harris was a Short Stories man all the way from 1937 through 1944. Arthur O. Friel is identified with Adventure, and published his last story for that pulp this very month, but would wrap up his pulp career with ten more pieces for Short Stories over the next two years. As for the other cover-billed writers, Richard Howells Watkins spread himself out evenly across all the "big four" adventure pulps -- he's competent but nothing special -- while I'm not sure what Bruce Douglas did to earn his spot on top, since his piece for this issue was his first pulp story -- under this name, at least, in more than two years. A novella by prolific western write Harry Sinclar Drago and a short story by H.S.M. Kemp round out this 176 page issue. Since Short Stories published on the 10th and 25th during its long twice-monthly period, and no one else, I believe, appeared regularly on the 25th, this is the day of each month when you'll most likely see a cover from this popular pulp.