'I am a fighter. A man fighter.'

You can tell a pulp writer is confident of his storytelling ability, not to mention his story, when he skips an opportunity to write out a fight scene. In "Big Fella" (Adventure, January 1, 1932) Robert Carse has his protagonist, a Texas boxer stranded in Spain by an absconding manager, try to earn money by betting that "no man can known me off this handkerchief when I spread it on the floor and stand upon it." The scene ends just as it's about to begin, with "Big Fella" eagerly waiting for three men to take their shots. Carse ends a paragraph on an ellipsis, and starts the next the next morning, with our hero "full of food and equally full of liquor." He'll try the stunt again shortly, only to almost lose when a matador confronts him. The matador's protege sees potential in Big Fella's footwork and poise, despite his size. The Texan will train to be a bullfighter, but will also use his ranching expertise to help raise the bulls. Things get a bit corny from there, as Big Fella befriends a bull that rescues him from another rampaging animal, only to find himself encountering his taurine savior in the bullring as a substitute toreador in his first public performance. I couldn't help but be reminded of the cartoon where Popeye the Sailorman insists that "I ain't gonna harm no bull!" In this case, to prove to a hostile crowd that he's no coward, Big Fella fights the bull the American way, by steer wrestling the animal into submission. All ends well as the American keeps his job on the ranch, after conceding that "a big man can fight the bulls; but not a man who hasn't Spanish blood." The Spaniards don't see that as an insult, though I wonder. Carse wrote more than one bullfighting story in his career, though it was at most a minor subgenre for him. This story, however, gives you the idea that he had the bullfighting bug nearly as bad as Hemingway did; this came out the same year as the great man's Death in the Afternoon. "Big Fella" is relatively minor Carse, but minor Carse is usually above the pulp average.

'As much as I loved my king, I love the Legion.'

When is a Foreign Legion story not a Foreign Legion story? Perhaps when the subject isn't the French Foreign Legion but it's Spanish counterpart. The Spanish organization is the subject of Robert Carse's "Legion" (Adventure,  December 1936), set in North Africa in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Carse has something of a reputation as a leftist, so he might be expected to take the Republican side, but for this story, at least, he takes a neutral position. In short, an officer thought long lost escapes from Moorish captivity and promptly falls under suspicion as a relic of the old regime. The new commander is a Republican loyalist, but he and his predecessor eventually realize that their shared first loyalty is to the Legion. Their second shared loyalty is to Spain's colonial empire. Leftists the Republicans may have been, but that doesn't translate to anti-imperialism, at least in this story. Under Republican rule, the Legion's job remains to maintain Spanish rule in the region, while the old officer's main purpose is to avenge the insult to national pride he endured as a captive and virtual slave. The King of Spain may have oppressed  his own people, the old man concedes, "But before any King of Spain did that, we drove the Moors from there, swept them out and into the sea. I do not know, but I think that in the years the Moors held me as a slave the memory of those things kept me alive." The old hero dies an epic, almost Arthurian death, impaled on a bayonet but driving himself forward to get his old enemy the Moor in a literal death grip. So passes the old regime in honorable style, one might believe, though in fact it would be reborn in less honorable form, but leaving that aside, "Legion" is a typically solid action story from Carse that gains added interest from its historical context.

'I'm so sober, I'm damn near ready to fight anybody for any reason.'

Robert Carse wasn't the most prolific of pulp writers, and that probably explains why his work was consistently above average. He published a grand total of thirteen stories in 1932, including a six-part Argosy serial, and that's not much considering that his stuff usually appeared in weeklies like Argosy or Detective Fiction Weekly or in twice-monthlies like Adventure and what for that year was known as The Popular Complete Stories. This was the merger of Street & Smith's two general-adventure pulps, The Popular Magazine and Complete Stories. The selling point, as you might guess, was that there were no serials, when Argosy, by comparison, ran four at a time, so you weren't going to be in the middle of something if you picked up a TPCS. Carse specialized in what could be called the French Colonial genre, encompassing both Foreign Legion adventures and Devil's Island-type tales of brutality and resistance. "The Web" (February 1, 1932) has a little bit of both. Its co-protagonist, James, is an American who was framed for murder and condemned to the typical hell on earth so a crooked French Guiana politician (a "half-breed," of course) could take over the oil fields James inherited from his father. We never actually see the prison, since the story opens with James a free man in France, but suddenly subject to blackmail. Somehow, someone has learned that he's an escapee and fugitive, and that someone is demanding a huge sum of francs for his silence. Somehow James catches the interest of Rand, an alcoholic American journalist who only sobers up on the promise of a big story. He sees one in James's plight and together they discover that the very people who smuggled him out of prison are blackmailing him and other escapees. Basically it becomes a gangster story in a French setting, with Rand swinging from man of action to staggering drunk until he finally recruits a gang of ex-Legionnaires in Marseilles to take on the blackmailers, who of course include James's old enemy, who supposedly had been lynched in his homeland years ago. Rand may be rather implausible as a hero, arguably a sort of defective-detective type, but Carse's semi-hard boiled style makes him palatable. This is a "complete novel" at 48 pages and it's actually novelistically paced in an almost-daring way as Carse opens with several pages of dialogue introducing his protagonists to each other. Perhaps the Street & Smith editors were more indulgent of this than others. Fortunately Carse is good enough with dialogue that the protracted opening holds your interest, and there's enough novelty to the setting and situation to make this a fairly entertaining little thriller from one of pulp's more dependable writers.

'What the hell do you think a man is?'

Stories of France's colonial empire allowed pulp writers to express more ambivalence about imperialism than adventures set in the British Empire. That's not to say that much pulp fiction was expressly anti-imperialist -- though one Foreign Legion specialist, J. D. Newsom, declared himself against in an Argosy autobiography. It's that tales of the French empire emphasize brutality and cruelty in a way English stories usually wouldn't, but it was usually cruelty and brutality as endured by Frenchmen or the mercenaries of all nations who filled the Foreign Legion. There's no British Empire equivalent of the Devil's Island subgenre, which is presumably to Britain's credit. If much of pulp fiction invited readers to vicariously test their courage, both Foreign Legion and Devil's Island stories posed this challenge: could you take it? For Depression readers especially, possibly, the hinted at how much worse things could get for a man. Robert Carse specialized in Devil's Island stories like "Prison" (Adventure, November 1, 1931) as well as Foreign Legion tales. The former could be summed up as the latter stripped of the last vestiges of romance and glory. "Prison's" protagonist is Rorke, an American Legionnaire and winner of the Croix de Guerre who ended up on Ile Diable, aka Ile Joseph, after killing his commanding officer, an archetypal military madman, to stop him from massacring his own men, both as a tactical blunderer and an outright murderer.

Only the influence of the U.S. ambassador got him imprisoned instead of executed, but prison proves a fate almost worse than death for Rorke because the warden, Morbillon, is the brother of the officer he killed. Their war of wills is the main event of the story, but Carse broadens its scope a little by shifting focus midway through to a third character, the young guard Geurot who sympathizes with Rorke once he learns of the American's heroism and comes to hate Morbillon's cruelty. He ends up collateral damage in the other two's private war, imprisoned after intervening to stop Morbillon from caning Rorke and finally striking his commander. While Rorke's rage for revenge sustains him, Geurot sickens rapidly but manages to smuggle Rorke a file for his latest escape attempt. When the American escapes his cell, he turns fatalistically selfless. No longer concerned with his own getaway, he confronts Morbillon to force him to free Geurot. "I got no way of saying it," Rorke says, presumably translated from his limited French, "I ain't got the words. But what the hell do you think a man is?" A bit implausibly, Morbillon seems to figure it all out in the end. He knows already that the old order's going to change; a committee of journalists with strong political backing back home is coming to investigate the prison. "Always we have blinded ourselves because we have been willing to die," he says of his family, "And the world is not that way any more. It has stopped being that way....France and the penal code. France -- That code is the only thing which has not changed, and which should be changed." He now expects his own court-martial to effect that change as Rorke, grateful but somewhat uncomprehending, goes his way. One suspects that at the last moment Carse turned his villain into a mouthpiece for his own opinion, though there's no "Camp Fire" comment this issue to confirm that. A Devil's Island story easily could veer into sadomasochistic territory, but Carse keeps things tasteful, concentrating on the prisoners' isolation and deprivation and how they can drive men mad. Without much violence, he conveys the extremity of the experience in a manner that no doubt chilled some original readers, while closing on an optimistic note that suggests that this, too -- like anything else in the pulp world -- could be endured and overcome.

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:

VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: Robert Carse, FROM THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE (1951)

Robert Carse is one of my favorite pulp writers. He was very good at Foreign Legion stories and similar stuff, from Devil's Island or prison colony tales to the adventures of mercenaries in turbulent Latin America. One of his persistent interests was Haiti, the setting of such Argosy serials as The Drums Roar (1935) and Dark Thunder (1939), the latter in some ways the first hint of where Carse would go with From the Sea and the Jungle.  He was intrigued by the seemingly paradoxical notion of Nazi activity in Haiti, and by creating a fictional analogue for Haiti in the Republic of Macuta Carse freed himself to explore the paradox more deeply in the novel. It's stunning to see at least one admittedly light-skinned Macutan -- one with German blood as well -- take the Nazi side as war comes to the Western Hemisphere, but the deeper reality Carse portrays is a justified resentment of the United States for Americans' racist contempt for the Macutan government and its military. It's often easy to lose track of who the bad guys are in the novel, since Carse builds up a genuine Nazi German big bad by keeping him in the distant background, almost like a Kurtz figure the novel's hero must reach at the end of a nightmarish quest. While the Nazis wage submarine warfare on Atlantic shipping from a nearly inaccessible base, the Americans engineer a coup d'etat and assert their hegemony over Macuta in insultingly heavyhanded fashion. Most of the representatives of the American government or military are jerks, as Carse demonstrates in a scene where drunken soldiers pretty much wreck an elite Macutan club and humiliate the newly-elevated president and his wife.

For all that, Carse's hero is an American in the Bogart mode. Johnny Michaels is a onetime small-time gangster, a rum-runner and gun-runner, who settled in Macuta and went legit by opening a popular hotel. The Nazi, Hans Ludig, was once Johnny's best friend in Macuta, apparently egging on his resentment of the U.S. while playing what Johnny belatedly recognizes as a long con on him. Johnny is no racist -- he recalls hankering after "high yaller girls" as a young man -- and is disgusted by the unthinking racism of most Americans he encounters. Inevitably, however, he must take his country's side even as the Americans continue to behave abominably toward Macuta. He must track down Ludig not so much for personal payback, even though he feels that Ludig had tricked him for years, as to avenge a young American sailor, the sole survivor of a ship torpedoed by a sub from Ludig's base, who eventually succumbs to the horrible burns he suffered in the attack, despite the best care of Johnny and his White Russian girlfriend Danila -- she's the naked lady on the back cover; the front portrays a sort of voudou priestess who's pretty much just a friend of Johnny's. Carse somewhat overplays the bonding of Johnny and the dying sailor, who apparently reminds Johnny of his younger, more innocent self, and the emotional impact of the sailor's death as the motivator for Johnny's quest to destroy Ludig. Having excelled at slam-bang action in the pulps, Carse falters when he tries to be introspective or retrospective in proper literary style. Reminiscences pop up at odd moments in the story but never quite make Johnny Michaels into the fully rounded character Carse wants him to be.

From the Sea and the Jungle is 347 pages in the 1952 Popular Library Giant paperback edition I own, and at times it was nearly as much a slog to get through as the one Johnny experiences after he escapes from a Macutan prison and embarks on his hunt for Hans Ludig. The novel spends too much time inside Johnny's head for its own good, but that's Carse trying to write an "adult" novel as much as a literary one. It can't quite be a fully adult novel in the sense we take for granted today; for Carse "muck" is the equivalent of Norman Mailer's "fug" from The Naked and the Dead, for instance. But despite Carse's limitations as a psychological novelist, the inherent tension of the political situation in Macuta holds the novel together until Carse goes into action mode on more familiar pulp terrain in the final third of the book. Prisons and prison break are his meat, and from the time Johnny is thrown into prison for helping some Macutan fliers flee the country (to fight for the Free French) the novel moves more briskly, even as Carse cuts away from the jungle action to the American debauch in the Macutan capital. Interestingly, Carse keeps his Nazi villain at a distance all the way to the end. Yes, Johnny finally faces his friend-turned foe, but Carse isn't interested in giving Ludig a big scene to either explain himself or expound on his Nazi evil. He's like a human MacGuffin, someone everyone wants to get but without intrinsic value as a character. I don't recall the poor man having a line of real dialogue in the whole book. I suppose that may be because, with the war over, Carse wasn't interested in writing anti-Nazi propaganda. A sort of permanent undeclared war between Macuta and the United States, papered over by a world war, is arguably his real subject, though Johnny Michaels' personal-redemption story -- he had thought himself soft, if not a coward, for giving up the gangster life, and he fears that his involvement in Macutan intrigues has alienated him from Danila -- finally overwhelms the social commentary. Carse leaves us with an unresolved paradox: Johnny is our hero for acting like a good American and stopping the Germans, but From the Sea and the Jungle may leave readers wondering what actually was good about being an American, or at least an American abroad. It's no great or even very good novel, but it is an often thought-provoking relic of the popular literature of World War II.

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

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 7

This 1934 Argosy is from my own collection. One of the "Two Adventure Novelettes" advertised on the banner is Ralph R. Perry's "The Wrong Move," which I'll be sharing with you later today. It's one of seven Bellow Bill Williams stories Perry published in Argosy that year, his most productive with his tattooed pearler. Let's find out a little more about the rest of the issue:

Cover author Karl Detzer specialized in firefighting stories. I like what I've read of him, and the first installment of The Fatal Alarm was pretty entertaining. Billing it as a "Chicago novel" rather than a "fireman novel" is apt, because Detzer is attentive to the role of petty politics in a firefighter's career. I haven't read more past this issue (there's an installment in the unz.org trove) but I'd consider a chapter an incentive when considering issues for future purchase. The other adventure novelette is Jack Allman's "The Curse of the Khans," a survival story set in Tibet back before the present Dalai Lama became a global icon of benign spirituality. The pulp Tibet, by comparison, is a barbaric place where the lamas often are far from benign. That may be unsettling if not scandalous to some modern readers, but on its own terms Allman's is a decent action story. Better still is Robert Carse's short story "Adios," in which an old American mercenary is drawn reluctantly into a Latin American revolution, only to take revenge on both sides. The other serials are Max Brand's Brother of the Cheyennes, which I find hard to judge, having dropped in the middle of it, and the conclusion of George F. Worts's The Gold Coffin, featuring his fighting defense attorney Gillian Hazeltine. It was the first bit of Hazeltine I ever read and I wasn't really impressed. Lawyers growl at one another a lot to set the overwrought tone. Read a Hazeltine, I say, and you'll appreciate how good Erle Stanley Gardner really is at this sort of thing. Lest I forget, Samuel Taylor contributes a western short story with a stuttering hero. The hero narrates the story, but Taylor thankfully refrains from having him narrate with a stutter. Instead, Stuttering Steve narrates in the colloquial present tense I associate with Frank Richardson Pierce's No-Shirt McGee -- not quite dialect, but not quite formally grammatical, either. Overall, it's a strong issue from one of Argosy's strongest years. I may share more of it with you besides the Bellow Bill story, and if I feel really ambitious I may scan the whole thing eventually. For now, this issue was sponsored by:

THE PULP CALENDAR: March 22

Jail break, eh? I don't know, but I just don't like this guy's chances. I see what he's trying to do but by modern standards Lejaren Hiller's convict just doesn't look formidable or badass enough. However, I like the chances of Robert Carse's cover story being good stuff, since Carse was a badass writer who did "revolt and riot" pretty well.  The only series character this issue is Robert H. Rohde's Reggie Chivers, the "Red Duke," who made his debut the year before. "Out From Under" was the 11th Chivers story in less than a year, but the character wouldn't appear again until August 1931, if the Fiction Mags Index can be relied on. The only other author I know from this week is Fred MacIsaac, who continues his serial Heirs of Murder. Edwin C. Stengelsen's sole pulp credit, the story "The Rowboat Pilot," appears in this issue, but a onetime author could just as easily be one of this issue's established contributors using a pseudonym for a second story. As a reminder to watch out when initials substitute for names, M.E. Chase, author of "Condemned by the Text," is Mary Ellen Chase, an English professor at Smith College making her only Detective Fiction Weekly appearance after a run of Argosy stories in 1927. Of Maxwell Smith, author of "Cold," I have nothing to say except that he was a busy detective story writer of the period. And in the end, I guess I wish that poor con with his paper hat and his torn shirt and his pipe or rod a litlle luck crashing out.

THE PULP CALENDAR: January 4

Back on January 1 we took a look at an Argosy from that date in 1938. What a difference three years make! Later in 1938 the weekly cut its page count for the first time in many years, going down from 144 to 128. In the spring of 1940 came another cut, reducing the weekly page count to 112. Argosy remained the same on the outside until that summer, when it adopted the standard cover format you see here, eliminating the individual cover paintings that are pulp magazines' most appealing feature for many collectors. One suspects that this was a cost-cutting measure, since artists no longer had to be paid. But it may also have been another effort to mainstream Argosy. Read "Argonotes" letter columns from after the switch and you'll find some readers applauding the change. Those now-beloved, often lurid covers were considered by some, if not many, as pulps' most embarrassing feature. This more classy, if less exciting, cover design made it easier for some readers to carry an issue away from the newsstand or read the thing in public. The Munsey company must not have been satisfied with the results, since further changes were coming, as announced in this ad on the inside front cover.

 

At the same time that Munsey was trying to flood the pulp market with new titles in an attempt to claim market share for its "Red Star Line," the company seemed to believe that the pulp format itself was no longer viable for its flagship publication. Argosy wasn't the first pulp to experiment this way. Another of the Big Four general-interest pulps, Blue Book, had gone large (the technical term is "bedsheet") for a little while in the early 1930s, and would do so again, to tremendous aesthetic effect, later in 1941. By comparison, you can't help catching a whiff of desperation in Argosy's forthcoming transformation, which would prove the first of many changes in 1941, none of which inspired much confidence in the once-mighty magazine's long-term future.

Inside, the main event is a "short novel" by the prolific Donald Barr Chidsey. The Elizabethan setting would seem like a natural to Chidsey -- who had published a hard-boiled biography from the period, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Elizabeth's Racketeer, in 1932. But if anything Chidsey is too eager to show off his knowledge, including impenetrable street argot, in a "novel" that proves a little too short. To me, at least, the climax came a little abruptly after an elaborate buildup, and there's too much attention paid to the hero's junior pickpocket helper to my taste, too.

Instead, the best story of this issue is a short one by one of my favorites, Robert Carse. He specialized in stories of tough men in desperate circumstances. He's one of the top Foreign Legion writers but has impressed me in settings as diverse as Devil's Island and Depression U.S.A. "The Captain, The Parson and the Sea" pits a hardcase captain against a humane parson on a pre-Panama Canal voyage around Cape Horn to Gold-Rush California with a mutinous crew. The Parson initially sees the Captain as a brutal tyrant but discovers his virtues, and the necessity of some of his policies, along the way, while the Captain comes to respect the Parson as a man and a worker. Thankfully, Carse here resists the temptation, as he doesn't always do at this point in his career, to throw in a romantic subplot, though one is teased throughout by including a gambler's daughter among the passengers.

Otherwise, this issue finds us in the middle of one of Max Brand's popular Dr. Kildare serials, as well as a western serial by the dependable Bennett Foster and a flying serial, set in the barnstorming 1920s, by authentic pilot Louis C. Goldsmith, at this point a rising star among pulp writers, whose career was cut short by World War II and who died in a transport plane crash in Scotland in 1943. There's also a story in Dale Clark's comedy series about sleazy Hollywood agent J. Edwin Bell, which I rarely find funny and never find proper content for a pulp magazine. The Carse story is the highlight so here it is for you to download and read:

"The Captain, The Parson and the Sea," by Robert Carse.

Argosy Weekly, January 4, 1941.