BELLOW BILL WILLIAMS in "BLOOD PAYMENT" (ARGOSY, October 6, 1934)

The "Law of the Solomons," according to Ralph R. Perry, is that "any native who enters the clearing of a white man unclothed, or carrying a weapon, may be shot." A lone female anthropologist is attempting to enforce this law against a "native orgy" virtually on her doorstep when Bellow Bill Williams arrives on the island of Rumakotu. Out pearling by himself, Bill got a booboo while trolling and soon realized that he has to see a doctor to escape blood poisoning. "To play a lone hand exacts its penalties," Perry notes. Rather than take a long run to Tahiti, Bellow Bill recalls that a trader on Rumakotu used to be a doctor and probably still knows enough to fix Bill's trouble. Instead of the doctor Bill finds the anthropologist besieged in her bungalow, and at least one native armed with an automatic rifle, when they're not supposed to have firearms of any sort. After fighting his way to the girl, Bill learns that the doctor has disappeared after attempting to calm the whipped-up natives, while a third white man has been lost at sea. Something about the story doesn't sound right to Bill, who's convinced by the native with the rifle that yet another white man, and a malevolent one, must be on the island. In short, there's a mystery for Bellow Bill to solve while safeguarding the plucky girl scientist against the natives. "Blood Payment" is one of the more indefensibly racist of Perry's stories, and while Bill is more physically handicapped than normal by his illness -- he never can shoot well, anyway -- the story isn't that much of a mystery since Bill's every hunch proves right, making him more infallible than he usually is in this series. This is still good, suspenseful pulp action from one of Argosy's more popular series of the early 1930s. You can read it for yourself by following the link below.

Ralph R. Perry, "Blood Payment."

ARGOSY, October 6, 1934

Pulp Reading: ARGOSY, April 24, 1937, COMPLETE

My Labor Day weekend project was to finish an Argosy scan I started months ago, only to get distracted by other finds and projects. I scanned and uploaded the April 17 issue earlier this year, and I have the May 1 issue for future scanning. This new upload will allow collectors to read the complete two-parter by Joel Townsley Rogers, Locusts From Asia, in which a yellow-peril flying circus intervenes in the skies over the western front during World War I. It also includes what I believe to be the first appearance of Frank Richardson Pierce's popular sourdough raconteur, No-Shirt McGee. Needless to say, there are plenty of other goodies for pulp fans. My long-term goal is to have Eustace L. Adams' Revolution With Pictures complete, which will require me to get the April 10 issue. The final installment is in the May 8 issue, which is available at unz.org. For now, I hope you enjoy these 144 pages from a year when Argosy was still going strong. Download the .cbz file from the link below.

ARGOSY WEEKLY, April 24, 1937

BELLOW BILL WILLIAMS in "THE SCAR" (ARGOSY, June 2, 1934)

Ralph R. Perry's tattooed pearler has a way of wandering into trouble. This time he has to watch helplessly from a distance as a yacht burns at sea without releasing any life boats. Once his own ship gets close enough for him to scan for victims or survivors, Bellow Bill sees a headless corpse on deck and presumes that a tribe thought tame has gone savage and turned pirate again because "Natives, not white men, take heads. Not even white murderers do that." He's proven wrong when he finds a survivor floating in the water, just as he's proven wrong after initially assuming she was dead. She'd tried to stab herself to spare herself the fate worse than death, but "you need strength to drive a knife home." She insists that the lead pirate, at least, was a white man, as she can tell from the shape of the man's head. Now that she's planted the idea in his head, Bill thinks he knows who did it, a trader named John Mageen, and comes up with a plan to trap him. Is Bellow Bill right this time? Perry makes Bill fallible enough that moments of doubt are possible. It also helps that Perry is really good at crafting antagonists for Bellow Bill. They're not necessarily charismatic characters who get the best lines, but they're usually tough, tenacious and clever. Perry makes nearly as big a deal about Bill's strength as Robert E. Howard does with his heroes, but Perry's special virtue as a pulp writer is the way he makes things relentlessly difficult for Bellow Bill. There's an extra degree of difficulty in "The Scar" because Bill ultimately has to outsmart an adversary who doesn't crack under pressure and doesn't betray himself in any obvious way. That doesn't mean there's no fighting; in fact, Bill soaks up several bullets during a climactic breakout from a death trap. But for all that his enemies often call him a tattooed ape, "The Scar" showcases Bellow Bill Williams as a thinking animal, if not a psychological warrior against evil. It ends a little too neatly, with the villain brazenly confessing his whole scheme to a British officer, but it's good, pulpy fun while it lasts. You can download it from the link below:

Ralph R. Perry, "The Scar,"

ARGOSY, June 2, 1934

Pulp Reading: ARGOSY, APRIL 17, 1937, COMPLETE

It took long enough, but here, finally, is the complete scan of Argosy for April 17, 1937, the issue that provides the wallpaper for this blog. Some of you have already sampled the cover story, Donald Barr Chidsey's "Graveyard of the Gods," which I uploaded last month. Here's a reminder of what else you'll be getting this time:

I plan to move forward with the following issue, for April 24, which will complete Joel Townsley Rogers' "Locusts from Asia" and give you more of the other two very good serials. Along with "Graveyard," the Adams and Radcliffe serials and Albert Richard Wetjen's "Madness of Captain Jonas" are the highlights of this issue, but once you've read all the stories you can rank them however you see fit. The fun begins when you click the link below to download this vintage issue of the venerable weekly:

ARGOSY WEEKLY, April 17, 1937

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

PULP READING: Robert Carse, "ADIOS," ARGOSY, April 7, 1934

Do a Google search for Robert Carse and it'll define him as primarily a nautical writer. That may more accurately describe his postwar career, but before World War II Carse (1902-71) was a versatile pulpster, many if not most of whose stories took place on dry land. He started out as a Great Lakes sailor, but after dabbling in journalism he tried his luck in the pulps and aimed for the top. His first published story, according to the Fiction Mags Index, appeared in Adventure in December 1925. He soon made his way into Sea Stories, but by the end of the Twenties war stories emerged as his specialty. He didn't appear in Argosy until the summer of 1930, but it soon became his primary pulp market. There he specialized in Foreign Legion stories and Devil's Island type stories. His 1934 story "Roll and Go," available at unz.org, is exceptional for being a more realistic, sympathetic take on the Great Depression, possibly inspired by the movie Wild Boys of the Road, and it may be one of the few hints in pulp of leftist sympathies that got Carse's name mentioned a few times by the House Un-American Activities Committee. His work does take an anti-fascist turn, possibly along "Popular Front" lines, in the later Thirties, but whether that made him a "premature anti-fascist" I can't say. When the war came Carse, in his fortieth year, joined the Merchant Marine and saw highly dangerous service on the Murmansk Run. Returning from the war, he continued to publish in Adventure and Blue Book but concentrated more on novels and non-fiction. If there were suspicions about his ideology or loyalty, they didn't keep him from getting published in conservative establishment magazines from The Saturday Evening Post to Boy's Life in later years.

"Adios" is more cynical than political. It concerns an old American mercenary who considers himself retired from the wars, but just when he thought he was out .... Old Man Anderson is manipulated by different factions vying for control of a Latin American country, but when their schemes inflict collateral damage on Anderson's friends, he decides to be a plague on both their houses. It's a brisk read at 13.5 pages and shows Carse in good pulp form. Here's a directory of Carse's Argosy stories and serial chapters available at unz.org, and you can add "Adios" to that by following the link below.

Robert Carse, "Adios,"

ARGOSY, April 7, 1934

BELLOW BILL WILLIAMS in "The Wrong Move," ARGOSY, April 7, 1934

Bellow Bill gets slipped a Mickey and wakes up in a box on a boat. He isn't meant to suffocate because someone has placed weapons in the box with him, but what he's meant to do with them, not to mention where he is, exactly, are a mystery to the tattooed pearler. We know some of what's up because Ralph R. Perry has called our attention to the chess-playing Chinese who drugged Bill in the first place. In one sense Chen Fu treats Bill as a pawn in a game we only gradually understand, but he actually sees Bill as a queen -- chess is the only context where that's possible -- with tremendous disruptive power. Soon enough, Bill learns that he isn't welcome on the ship. Soon after that, he learns that he's not the only prisoner on board. To say anymore would spoil a well-plotted tale in which Bellow Bill must depend as much on his wits as on his strength. Suffice it to say that Bill is no man's chesspiece. This is one of seven Bellow Bill stories that Perry published in 1934, a year that saw either Perry's peak of productivity -- there were only three Bellow Bills the following year -- or the character's peak of popularity. None of the 1934 stories are available in the unz.org trove, but I have four of them. You'll see the other three from my collection, at least, later this year. For now, enjoy twenty pages of prime pulp action by clicking on the link below:

Ralph R. Perry, "The Wrong Move"

ARGOSY, April 7, 1934

Pulp Reading: WESTERN STORY ROUNDUP, June 1951 - COMPLETE

After Street & Smith's venerable Western Story pulp folded in 1949, Popular Publications eventually acquired the rights to the title and revived it at the tail-end of the pulp era. Before that, Popular tried out a slightly different title, Western Story Roundup, for three issues in 1951. Picking up the numbering from All Story Western -- this third and final issue is technically Volume 4, No. 2 -- Roundup was one of several titles, including Adventure and Black Mask, with which Popular tried a new format that was smaller than the standard pulp but larger than the increasingly popular digests that would inherit pulp's kingdom. Popular went ad-free on these titles and kept interior illustration to the barest minimum. The final issue of Roundup was the most reprint-heavy of the three; six of its nine stories had appeared before, though the cover story by top-hand author Steve Frazee was an original. While Roundup didn't survive, the other titles reverted to full-scale pulp for the time they had left, while the last of all pulps, the Thrilling group's Ranch Romances, would adopt this format in its sad last years. Popular would revive Western Story Roundup in 1955 during its last-gasp attempt to maintain a line of fiction mags in the more conventional magazine format Adventure had adopted in 1953. Taking over the numbering of Rangeland Romances, Roundup and  Fifteen Western Tales ended with the year 1955, marking the end of Popular's once-mighty western magazine line. As for this issue, the Frazee story is good and I'll leave the rest for you to judge for yourselves. The complete issue is available in scanned form for download from the link below.

WESTERN STORY ROUNDUP, Vol. 4, No. 2, JUNE 1951

PULP READING: Frank Richardson Pierce, "SNATCHERS" (Short Stories, March 10, 1935)

Back on March 10 when I put a 1935 issue of Short Stories on the Pulp Calendar, I remarked that Frank Richardson Pierce's "Snatchers" was one of the few stories from that issue, readily available at unz.org, that I hadn't read. I've now rectified that omission. "Snatchers" was one in a series Pierce did for Short Stories about the heroic film actor Stan Dvorak. The Fiction Mags Index lists only "Snatchers" and a two-part serial from the following month as Dvorak stories, but Short Stories itself indicates that there were stories before "Snatchers." Perhaps inspired by The Spider, Pierce conceived Dvorak pretty much as Lon Chaney, Detective, with the added gimmick that Dvorak was only the nom de film of bland, handsome socialite John Stanley. Because his employer, the Para-Art studio, made sure that no photos existed of "Dvorak" out of makeup, Stanley could move freely in public and use his quick-change makeup skills, which extend in Chaney style to physical contortion, to solve mysteries and fight crime.

The movie milieu might seem a change of pace for Pierce, who's best know to me, at least, for westerns and northwesterns. But I recall that one of his most popular creations, the Yukon sourdough No-Shirt McGee, acted as a technical advisor for a movie production in one of his earliest appearances (the Arogsy two-part serial Sable, 1937), and subsequently spent a lot of time in the neighborhood of Hollywood. Anyway, "Snatchers" is a topical tale of kidnappers, that kind of crime having become more notorious if not more common in the early 1930s thanks to the kidnapping and killing of the Lindbergh baby, the exploits of Machine-Gun Kelly, etc. In the story, "Snatchers" is the title of a Para-Art production about a kidnapping carried out by the Yellow Peril menace Foo Yung, played by Stan Dvorak, who presumably brings a degree of authenticity to his performance thanks to a previous exploit involving a local tong. As a celebrity, Dvorak himself is a target for kidnapping, and in fact a gangster has infiltrated the Para-Art lot, disguised as a small-town theater-chain owner, looking for opportunities to snatch Dvorak. The gangster is given a copy of the "Snatchers" script, which gives him an idea for stashing or disposing of a victim. Seeing no prospect of snatching Dvorak, the gangster and his crew take the next best target, Dvorak's co-star Gladys Gale, by muscling in on a team of stunt drivers as a scene is filmed in which Gale's character is, in fact, kidnapped. As John Stanley, Dvorak has the studio publicize that he's Gladys's boyfriend so he can negotiate her release. The gangsters get their money and release Gale, only to take Stanley, assuming such a young swell should be worth some money himself. Now the gangsters' reliance on the "Snatchers" script works against them, since they don't realize that Stanley is Dvorak and knows exactly what they plan to do and how they plan to do it. Our hero prevails, inevitably, on the author's assumption that he keeps enough makeup stashed in a secret compartment in his show to turn himself into one of the gangsters at a crucial moment.

"Snatchers" left me unclear about whether Stan Dvorak or John Stanley was the real person, but earlier stories probably made that as clear as it would ever get. The hero doesn't really have much personality in either guise, while his boss at Para-Art is a mild Jewish stereotype. Pierce has an overconfidence typical of all pulp media in the power and efficiency of makeup that no one, I think, shares today, but this particular story amuses on a meta level as crime imitates art, only to find the truth about John Stanley stranger than fiction. I suspect the Dvorak stories were throwaway stuff compared to the No-Shirt McGee, or maybe even the Panhandle Series Pierce had started in Short Stories earlier in 1935. But Pierce is competent enough to ensure that "Snatchers" is a mildly entertaining page turner. For those who want to prove that to themselves, follow the link below.

Frank Richardson Pierce, "Snatchers"

SHORT STORIES, March 10, 1935

PULP READING: Eustace L. Adams, "ANYWHERE BUT HERE," Part Three

From the tremendous February 23, 1935 issue of Argosy, here's the third and concluding installment of Eustace L. Adams's serial, Anywhere But Here. International, commercial and romantic intrigue all reach a climax amid a typical fictional Latin American revolt carried out in classic pulp style. If you've been following along week to week, click below for the conclusion.

Eustace L. Adams, "Anywhere But Here," Part Three

ARGOSY, February 23, 1935

And for those waiting to read the whole thing in one gulp, here's the complete serial in one convenient package:

Eustace L. Adams,

ANYWHERE BUT HERE (complete!)

PULP READING: Eustace L. Adams, "ANYWHERE BUT HERE," Part Two

In old-time serial fashion, here's your weekly dose of Eustace L. Adams' 1935 Argosy serial Anywhere But Here, in which American aviators are embroiled in international intrigue in a fictional Central American country. Poor Al Burke has to worry about his kid sister and fellow flyer falling in love with his buddy Bat Gillespie, while Bat's old girlfriend from San Lorenzo starts to make moves on Al on the rebound. But as the illustration promises, Adams doesn't stint on the mayhem amid the romance. The concluding installment is part of an incredible Feb. 23 Argosy we'll peek at next Tuesday, and a few days later you'll be able to finish this story, or get the entire serial complete in one file. For those who can't wait for this week's episode, click on the link below and enjoy.

Eustace L. Adams, Anywhere But Here, Part Two,

ARGOSY, February 16, 1935.

PULP READING: Eustace L. Adams, ANYWHERE BUT HERE pt.1

From my battered but unbroken February 9, 1935 issue of Argosy, here's the first of three installments of Eustace L. Adams's serial Anywhere But Here. Check out my Feb. 9 Pulp Calendar piece for more info about the story. Adams was a wartime flier -- publicity placed him with the legendary Lafayette Esquadrille -- whose main gig was a series of aviation adventures for kids featuring Andy Lane. Pulps were his adult writing and he rose to the occasion with crisp action-adventure tales that are part hard-boiled and a little part Lost Generation in their world-weary attitude. Adams broke into Argosy in 1928 and, apart from flying pulps, that remained his main pulp market, with Short Stories running a distant second. He also wrote for such slicks as The American Magazine, a monthly from the makers of Collier's, and Cosmopolitan when it was more fiction-oriented than it is today.

This is a good-sized, thirty-page opening installment graced with the spot illustrations of the main characters with which Argosy broke up the monotony of text in 1934 and 1935 -- an enhancement it made no sense to abandon. Rest assured that I own the February 16 and 23 issues, so as long as they're cooperative you can expect to get the complete three-part serial if this installment gets you interested. Begin now this combination bromance and romance in turbulent Central America by clicking the link below:

Eustace L. Adams, ANYWHERE BUT HERE, Part One,

ARGOSY, February 9, 1935

PULP READING: Sidney Herschel Small, "THE GLOVE OF THE FOX," BLUE BOOK, September 1935

If the Sidney Herschel Small story I linked you to the other day gave you an appetite for more, or if you're interested in freebooting adventures in 1930s China, here's the one and only Small story I own in its original pulp form. As of 1935 pulp stories set in China had not yet taking a propagandistic turn. Sure, the Japanese are bad guys, but in this period it's hard to find a good guy in China. No one was obligated to treat Chiang Kai-shek as one, for instance. China stories thus could take a hard-boiled, almost amoral tone, if not a "plague on all your houses" attitude toward the brutal factions vying for the country.

In this story, Red Carson and his rugged Mongol sidekick encounter a "Red" warlord -- interestingly, Small describes his villain as a "theoretical" Red, as if he's only playing Communist for convenience -- while trying to rescue some Christian missionaries. This is a startlingly grim story, in which the hero allows an innocent white woman to be poisoned in order to persuade the villain to take poison himself, and tells the victim's bereaved husband that she's better off, since she'd been driven mad by the atrocities she's witnessed.

If you download the story you'll see why Blue Book had a reputation as the best illustrated pulp magazine. Other publishers were often stingy with illustration, but Blue Book was lavish with art from the likes of John Richard Flanagan, who contributed a couple of double-page spreads to the Small story. I've put the September 1935 cover at the front of the file so you can get the full impact of those spreads if you go to two-page mode. "Glove of the Fox" is a brisk 11 pager and the first of more to come from this issue of Blue Book. Look for more Pulp Reading scans in the days to come.

Sidney Herschel Small, "THE GLOVE OF THE FOX,"

Blue Book, September 1935

DIME WESTERN May 1948, COMPLETE

After posting individual stories from my copy of Dime Western for May 1948, I've finally completed my first cover-to-cover scan of a pulp magazine. Compared to many scanners out there, my resources are very limited. I use an HP C309 printer-scanner and the photo enhancement software that comes with it and Windows. After years of happily downloading incredible stuff from the Yahoo Pulpscans group, however, I decided that I had no more excuses for not doing my part to preserve the pulp heritage. Since Dime Western at this time was only 100 pages long, counting the covers, I set myself a relatively easy goal. Still, you'd be surprised at how hard it is to align a page just right, especially if your magazine is still intact, and how many botched scans had to go to the Recycle Bin. Finally, I have something complete with the cover coming up as your thumbnail the way it should. Let's review the contents once more:

You have major genre authors in Flynn and Thompson on top of the good short stories I'd downloaded earlier. The file downloadable from the link below is 100 MB. Like the story files, it's in the CBZ format, which is just a glorified .zip file in readable form. If you have Calibre's free text-conversion software you can turn this magazine into whatever file format suits you best. Enjoy this issue of Dime Western for posterity with my compliments. Click on the link below to begin:

DIME WESTERN vol. 52, no. 1, May 1948

PULP READING: Bill Gulick, "THE MADNESS OF BIG OLAF," DIME WESTERN, MAY 1948

Here's another scan from my copy of the May 1948 Dime Western. Bill Gulick was one of the last surviving western pulp writers -- I suspect the precocious John Jakes will be the last if he isn't already -- living 97 years to 2013. Several of his novels were made into movies, most notably Bend of the Snake, which became Anthony Mann's Bend of the River. May 1948 sees Gulick at the brink of a hiatus; he would not publish another pulp story for more than a year; he may have been working on Bend of the Snake at the time. "The Madness of Big Olaf" would be a textbook example of pulp's political incorrectness if anyone really cared how Swedes were portrayed in popular fiction. Gulick's title character is as much a stereotype as any ethnic character you might encounter. "You know Swedes," a character says, "And you know how they get after a winter in the woods. Like wildmen." The titular Swede's madness if only one of the protagonist's problems. The other is that he has to lay a certain amount of railroad track by a certain time to fulfill a contract -- a typical pulp situation -- but a business rival is running a saloon nearby to keep the hero's work crew, including numerous Swedish wild men, good and drunk. Big Olaf is mad at our hero because the hero knocked him out with a lucky punch in their first encounter. The hero figures out a way to solve both problems at once. I'm not really bothered by the stereotyping, but then again I'm no Swede. The story is neat and concise and as the first piece from Gulick that I've read it made a good impression. Click on the link below to read and judge for yourselves.

Bill Gulick, "The Madness of Big Olaf."

Dime Western, May 1948

P.S.This story is sponsored, as you'll see, by the Mutual Radio Network. I find it interesting that the list of mystery programs in their ad doesn't feature their best-known show, The Shadow. Could that have something to do with him being a creature of a rival pulp publisher? He knows, probably.

PULP READING: Tom W. Blackburn, "Bring 'Em In Kicking!" DIME WESTERN, MAY 1948

Here's another story scanned from the pages of Popular Publications' May 1948 issue of Dime Western. Tom W. Blackburn was a busy pulpster of the period. In May 1948 he placed stories in seven different pulps, all but one for Popular. Four of those were novellas or novelettes, but "Bring 'Em In Kicking!" is a seven-page short story, refreshingly free of melodrama, by-the-numbers romance angles or the "yuhs" and "tuhs." It's basically a survival story as the hero has to bring an injured, uncooperative survivor of a raid back to the fort. Blackburn started out as a ghostwriter for some of the reputedly more prolific authors before publishing under his own name. By 1950 he had broken into the slicks, but his biggest success was to come in Hollywood, and not in prose. By far, Blackburn's most famous piece of writing is "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," the theme song for the epochal Disney TV series that he also scripted. Our story is just a little bit more edgy than that and is typical solid pulp writing from Blackburn. Click on the link below to download it and judge for yourself.

Tom W. Blackburn, "Bring 'Em In Kicking!"

Dime Western, May 1948