THE PULP CALENDAR: December 1 -- featuring BELLOW BILL WILLIAMS in "THE RATS OF MAHIA"

Here's a remarkable 1934 Argosy in a less than remarkable copy from my own collection. This issue was a must-have for me because it has two of my favorite things in a pulp magazine: a Bellow Bill Williams story by Ralph R. Perry and a Tizzo the Firebrand tale by George (Frederick Faust) Challis. This is, in fact, the conclusion of Tizzo's two-part debut, The Firebrand, but that event is understandably overshadowed by the cover feature, the opening installment of Theodore Roscoe's seminal voodoo serial A Grave Must Be Deep! Roscoe, of course, is writing about Haitian zombies, not the kind that eat brains. He was no doubt inspired by recent voodoo movies, including Bela Lugosi's White Zombie and the Fay Wray vehicle Black Moon, but Grave shapes up on first impression as yet another "old dark house" story in an exotic setting. A starving artist's girlfriend and patron is an heir to a relative who died and left a fortune in Haiti. Accompanied by a well-spoken native lawyer, the couple travel to the "magic isle" and encounter a variety of grotesques -- and that's just in the old man's household. He's left a will putting the girl far back in the order of succession to his fortune, with a stipulation applying to all heirs requiring them to stay at his estate for a certain amount of time. Need I add that the girl moves a couple of steps closer to the big payday in this installment alone? Perhaps I should add that the old man also stipulated that he be buried Haitian style with all the safeguards against being turned into a zombie, while the lawyer blusters that he doesn't believe in such stuff. For some people Roscoe's writing will be irredeemably racist, but this is a story in which everyone but our hero and heroine is a grotesque caricature, be they black or white -- that extends to a German hanger-on whom everyone calls "the Nazi." It promises to be all quite deranged, and I look forward to catching up with the rest of it someday.

Meanwhile, Bellow Bill looks to be in a bad spot. He joins the chase after a high-class island dinner party is interrupted by a half-naked Melanesian crashing the party, cleaving the skull of a society matron and stealing her sapphire necklace. Diving after the savage, he sees the culprit getting into a boat and assumes, since the sea is still stormy after a hurricane, that the gang must be heading for a nearby island known by Bill as the haunt of Knife-Hand Foster, a notorious "blackbirder" named after the retractable bayonet he wears over a mutilated hand. He finds Foster in his own boat, having killed the Melanesians in "self-defense" but claiming that he saw the sapphire necklace go over the side during the melee. Bill doesn't believe it but has no real clue where the thing might be, and no idea of how to get at it except to go to the rat-infested isle of Mahia, where more human rats await him. Bill and his creator are in good form here as Perry emphasizes that our hero has rushed overconfidently into a situation where he may be out of his depth, pitted against not one but two blackbirders -- slave raiders to you -- who seem to be working together but may also have separate agendas that make them hard to predict. As usual, Perry excels at throwing obstacles in Bellow Bill's path, including the vicious, hungry little title creatures. Few pulp writers do action thrillers as well as Perry, and anyone who's become a Bellow Bill fan this year should enjoy this one.

It's not Robert Carse but Richard Wormser who writes this issue's Foreign Legion novelette. While Carse contributes a sea story about an officer who takes big risks in search of fame, even when situations don't necessarily require his intervention, Wormser writes something more like a detective story in a Foreign Legion setting. This makes a difference. The protagonist of "To Hell For the Devil" is a detective who hopes to make a name for himself by capturing one of the gang who kidnapped, tortured and mortally injured the heir to a prominent fortune. A combination of ambition and indignation over the fate of the victim drives the detective to pursue his man across the Atlantic and into Africa, where he finds that his quarry has enlisted in the Legion. This is a problem, since the Legion doesn't cooperate with American law enforcement. It depends too much on fugitives from justice for its manpower, and turning over a wanted criminal, no matter how heinous his crime, would discourage enlistments. Our detective sees no alternative to enlisting in the Legion himself in the hope of coming across the fugitive, even though the Legion is fully aware of his identity and purpose and is determined to keep him as far away from his man as possible. For a while it becomes a standard Legion story as the chubby middle-aged detective is whipped (not quite literally) into shape and almost loses track of his mission. But a big battle brings together many units and gives him the break he's looking for. Had this been a typical Legion story, the sort Carse, Georges Surdez or J. D. Newsom wrote, you might expect hunter and quarry to bond in battle, forcing a dilemma on the detective in the end. But Wormser is writing a detective story, and once the big battle is out of the way the detective grabs the fugitive and bolts for the border, knowing full well that he'll be shot for desertion if the Legion catches up with him. Wormser's unorthodox approach freshens up some of the familiar Legion tropes, and even if his story does end somewhat anticlimactically it's a good read.

Rounding out the issue are Hapsburg Liebe's short story "Kid Sheriff" and an installment of Ralph Milne Farley's sci-fi/horror serial The Immortals.  This is such a good issue overall that instead of scanning the Bellow Bill story alone, I've scanned and uploaded the whole thing. It's a hefty .cbz file that you can convert to a .zip and then adapt to suit your viewing or reading needs, but it ought to be a treat for any pulp fan. You can get it by clicking on the link below:

ARGOSY, December 1, 1934

And before I forget, this issue was sponsored by:

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 5

Nice move, Argosy. This 1938 cover lists five authors on the cover but forgets the guy who wrote the cover story. If I see animals and a man with a movie camera on an Argosy cover I say to myself, "That's Dave McNally." So I look at this cover and I ask myself, "Where's Richard Wormser?" Sure enough, Wormer has a McNally novelet, "The Singing Cats of Siam," inside. McNally must have been pretty popular, since we've seen him already this year, when our Calendar began. Not to acknowledge Wormser was either an error or a slap in the face, but it didn't stop him from submitting McNally stories, or Argosy from publishing them. In any event, Wormser needn't have felt overly slighted, since Edgar Rice Burroughs didn't make the cover, either, for the fifth chapter of his Carson of Venus serial.

I wonder how many browsers first assumed that L. G. Blochman wrote the story about the cameraman and the cats. His actual contribution was "Money for Sale," which could have been about anything. Blochman wrote a lot of stories set in Asia, but he also translated mysteries by Georges Simenon and others from French to English for American markets. The other cover-billed authors are known quantities, with Elston the least impressive to me. Richard Sale's story has one of those formulaic pulp titles from the period: "X Had a Y," in this case "Perseus Had a Helmet." Why this particular formula was so popular I can't say. Cornell Woolrich's contribution is "Wild Bill Hiccup," likely not one of the suspense master's finest or most suspenseful hours. The Wormser and the Blochman would probably make up for that.

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 22

If the cover story of this 1938 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly is "I Sell Strikes," I expect something about some sort of labor racketeer, not the montage of music notes, chorus girls, a grumpy old man and a giant martini glass the cover artist throws at us. Still, I've read enough of Richard Wormser, particularly his Dave McNally stories for Argosy, to trust him in whatever direction he takes the story. Two popular series continue in this issue as D. B. McCandless contributes another adventure of his female detective Sarah Watson and Judson P. Philips continues a Park Avenue Hunt Club serial. Steve Fisher, best known for I Wake Up Screaming, brings back his own series character, Tony Key, for the provocatively titled "Me and Mickey Mouse." Four short stories round out this issue's contents. Wormser and Fisher probably make this one worth a look if you don't mind being stuck in the middle of the serial

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 1

ARGOSY is considered the original pulp magazine. Originally a weekly in the late 19th century, it went monthly from 1894 to 1917. It resumed a weekly schedule until the fall of 1941. One of the so-called "big four" general-interest pulps (along with Adventure, Blue Book and Short Stories), Argosy was the cheapest of them (at 10 cents) and, as a weekly, the most frequent. Naturally it ran more serials than the others, as many as four going on at the same time at different points in the magazine's history. You could find nearly every genre in Argosy except for romance and, arguably, horror. You could expect to see a western story almost every week, along with some modern-dress adventure story and probably a period adventure story. Modern stories often spanned the globe, following explorers, hunters, spies and badass sailors to exotic places filled with people who were indisputably (if often also stereotypically) different from you, the reader. Argosy commonly promised "Action Stories of Every Variety" and usually delivered. Since we'll see Argosy on the Calendar more often than any other pulp I'll save further comments for the year to come, apart from introducing this particular issue.

The cover by V. E. Pyles doesn't illustrate any of the stories in the January 1, 1938 issue. Pyles isn't exactly taking advantage of a recent change in Argosy's cover design that eliminated the red band across the top third that had been virtually the magazine's trademark. The redesign gave cover artists more room to work with and the results were sometimes impressive, but I've come around to preferring the old red-band style, if only because that's what's on the covers in the years I consider Argosy's best, just a couple of years before this issue appeared. The feature story this week is Richard Sale's "A Swap for Stonewall Jackson," which is, as you may have guessed, a Civil War story. Sale is best known in pulps for his detective stories. He graduated to screenwriting and directing (as did fellow pulpsters Alan LeMay and Charles Marquis Warren, the latter of whom may be getting more attention lately than in a long time). I haven't read this particular story (but you can!) but I've read some other Civil War stuff of his and it's not his best stuff. The other star writers this issue are Karl Detzer, who specialized in firefighter stories but here continues his World's Fair Mystery serial, and Richard Wormser, whose "Isle of Yellow Girls" was the latest in his series about Dave McNally, a kind of younger, tougher Carl Denham (he compares himself with Frank Buck, but which name do you recognize?) who travels the world searching for exotic attractions to sell to circuses, zoos, theaters, etc. I'll let him introduce himself:

"I've fought," McNally said, "in every latitude and longitude on this Earth.From Hey Rubes in Iowa to bandits on the Caucasus, from cannibals in Borneo to headhunters in Africa. I've been in eight revolutions, three wars, five race riots and so many fights I've scar tissue from the Achilles tendon on my right heel to the mastoid bone on my left ear. I--" 


After which McNally faints from a fever. He may have been a little delirious, but it sounds like an interesting career. "Isle" is a good story that keeps you guessing about what sort of trouble McNally has gotten himself into as the trouble escalates to apparent murder. Wormser disrupts expectations early by introducing a character as a "Kanaka," which was the standard term for South Sea island people who are usually portrayed in pulp as simple savages. This story's Kanaka, however, is a high-school educated Hawaiian (and an Eagle Scout) who often seems to know more than McNally, especially about what's really going on in the story. That actually makes him a suspicious character, especially when he seems to be consorting with some Japanese, but I'll let those who are interested figure things out themselves by reading the story. You'll note that the interior artist is teasing readers just a bit by having one of the yellow girls barely show some nipple on the opening page. That bit of exploitation aside, "Yellow Girls" refreshingly avoids the most blatant stereotypes of pulp fiction without succumbing to the temptation to make everyone generically alike. McNally is an entertaining character whose adventures have amused me in the past. I have some more McNally stories in my personal Argosy collection that I hope to share with you down the line. For now, the entire January 1, 1938 issue is available as part of the pulp trove at unz.org, where you can download individual stories for your reading convenience. This issue also has one of C. F. Kearns's stories about his Northwest hero Handsled Burke, which are usually good stuff, a serial chapter by one of my favorite pulpsters, Eustace L. Adams, and the conclusion of a serial by Lester (Doc Savage) Dent that isn't (based on my reading of an earlier chapter) one of the great man's finest hours. Taken as a whole, this is a modest sample of what Argosy has to offer, and there is more and better to come.