'Kinney was only eighteen,but moocah salesmen get them young.'

Donald Barr Chidsey worked in a wide variety of pulp genres from historical swashbucklers to contemporary crime stories. In "The Prairie Stretched Away" (Short Stories, July 25, 1940) he tried his hand at drug humor, though the story is probably on funny in retrospect. It intends to be a taut, suspenseful story, and I suspect that Chidsey brought a sense of irony to his sensitive subject matter, since narcotics are, in fact, instrumental to the story's happy resolution. The hero, Kinney, is introduced hitchhiking, hoping to make his way across the country after kicking what seems to have been a bad drug habit. Chidsey portrays a bleak, empty landscape, emphasizing his hero's isolation, until a truck nearly sideswipes Kinney on the shoulder of the road. As the truck goes on its way, Kinney finds that he's stumbled onto a line of wires that lead to the underside of a nearby bridge. Sure enough, he's also stumbled onto a band of gangsters who plan to blow up the bridge when a bus passes over it. The killers are professional and impersonal; they don't know who specifically ordered the atrocity or why it was ordered; it's all just a job of work to them, and though they're not to thrilled about the idea, they realize that they're going to have to kill Kinney as well. They're hiding out and shivering cold in a nearby shed and Kinney proposes to make himself useful by getting some kindling for a fire. You see, before they got to the shed, they passed over a stretch of weed that's actually a stretch of weed.

Kinney, seeing those weeds in the beam of the flashlight, swallowed hard and tried to think about something else. Sure he knew them! For he had not only used the stuff but when he got hard up he'd peddled it and packed it into cigarettes. So naturally he knew those weeds. They'll grow wild about anywhere. There's nothing fastidious about them.

Naive as I was, I thought, when his addiction had been mentioned earlier, that Kinney had been hooked on harder stuff than this. I had forgotten that circa 1940 many folks found it hard to imagine harder stuff than marijuana, the weed with roots in hell! Fearful though he is of falling back into addiction, Kinney calculates that his only way to thwart the bombing and escape alive is to set a heap of the stuff on fire -- Chidsey emphasizes that the weeds are sun-dried and ready for use -- and get both his captors and, inescapably himself, high as a kite. This gives Chidsey an opportunity to experiment, based on what experience I dare not say, in portraying a marijuana high.

He heard an automobile. This was with one mind; the other mind said that there were no automobiles in the world, and what of it anyway. But he heard this. It was far away. He glanced first at the tall man, then at the short one. Had they heard it too? Was it possible they didn't hear? Were they deaf?
After a long while the taller man got to his feet and moved slowly toward the door, which was very far away. He did not seem to walk; he seemed to float along. His lips were moving but Kinney did not hear any words.

*   *   *

Through every thinnest corporeal tissue and every minutest vein he could trace the circulation of his blood along each inch of its progress. He knew where it slowed, and where it churned fitfully ahead. He knew when every valve flapped. His heart had been beating so loudly that he was amazed that the others did not hear it, but now the shack was filled with glory that suffocated, and his heart labored no longer, a mere pump, but had become a fountain; the jet surged upward and struck against the roof of his mouth, and fell noisily back, splashing and scampering through his body, so that he tingled all over. Maybe he was having a hemorrhage? He thought that he would die very soon.

Meanwhile the tall gangster falls into  the telltale giggle of the marijuana addict familiar to all fans of Reefer Madness. He then grows agitated and violent, like the marijuana-smoking Mexican bandits of many another pulp tale. He's convinced that Kinney is trying to run away while Kinney is convinced that he isn't moving at all. He threatens Kinney with a shotgun that Kinney perceives to be "half a mile or more away. He fires, and Kinney hears "a dull, delayed, apologetic 'boom' which tumbled into oblivion, as though ashamed of itself." This failure reduces to gunman to helpless laughter. All the while, the short gangster remains in a stupor. Finally, when neither criminal can function, Kinney staggers out to catch the transcontinental bus, then wakes to learn that he's a hero, offered a big reward by the bus company, but like a proper pulp hero, Kinney would rather have a job. His mentor, the man who saved him from addiction, approves of his choice and tells him, "Give you a job? Why, if that's all they give you I'll go out and dynamite a few of their buses, myself!" That's so pulp, but so's the whole story.

'I ain't havin' no ginger-haired she-catamaran poachin' around here, savvy?'

R. V. Gery was a British Navy veteran and ex-convict -- he did six months for fraud -- who settled in Canada and got into the pulp business. He started out as an Adventure regular but by the mid-1930s Short Stories had become his main market. "Magruder's Way" (November 25, 1937) is a title that tells only half the story, which is as much concerned with Red Heron's way as Jerry Magruder's. They're rival traders in the South Pacific, Magruder the established veteran, Heron the upstart interloper and a woman to boot. She's "poaching" on Magruder's normal trade with island natives and he doesn't like it. He expresses his disapproval in typical pulp male manner, warning her that "it'll be a spanked sit-upon for you -- and a single ticket to Sydney" when he catches up with her, "Go on down there an' get yourself marries. That's the lay for you!" Red Heron is a badass, however, and even more of a badass is her mate, the loyal but unscrupulous cockney Henry Jevons. The novelette evolves into a three-way battle as two villains, murderers and more literal poachers, an Australian and a Frenchman, make their play for anybody's boat. Magruder constantly underestimates Heron's ability to deal with this threat, perhaps because he sees how the stakes for her are higher than they would be for him.

Rusty [Magruder's mate] nodded again, sagely. 'They'll knock her off,' he observed. 'Sure's eggs!'
'Knock her off!' Cap'n Jerry almost groaned. Rusty's imagination was never his strong point. 'Ain't you been brought up to know the facts o' life, ye big ox? If t'was only that -- An' here, too, right smack-dab in the middle of my islands. Man alive, shut your eyes an' think for a minute -- if ye can thing -- what that couple'll do with her. Judas Priest!'
Obediently, Rusty closed his eyes, but when he opened them it was not with any lurid envisagement.
'It ain't any business o'yourn,' he said. 'Thought ye didn't like her.'
Cap'n Jerry drew a long breath and expanded it to the bottom of his lungs in a torrent of abuse that once again beat anything even Rusty had ever listened to.
'Like her!' he yelled finally. 'Why, ye blitherein' ape, what's that got to do with it? Like her? My soul an' body, I wish she was in everlastin' blazes this minute an' stying there. But that ain't it, ye lummox. She's here -- an' if them swine get a her, there'll be somethin' happen that'll give us all a black eye hereabouts for good. Give me a black eye, by Joseph, all up an' down the islands, just for lettin' it happen.

Magruder isn't wrong about the Frenchman's intentions, but so singleminded is he in his determination to defend Red Heron's virtue that he ends up inadvertently sacrificing his own boat to the bad guys, while Red ends up taking him prisoner on her own ship. She then proves herself a super sailor by giving chase to the villains in the teeth of a storm. Magruder finally joining her at the wheel as the captains discover common interests. She's ready to overtake the enemy and seize Magruder's abandoned ship for salvage, with Cap'n Jerry locked in a cabin, when Jerry recalls that the outsailed killers have an equalizer on board: Magruder's cargo of explosives. Gery moves smoothly into thriller mode as Heron closes in on her quarry, the Frenchman prepares to toss a bomb at her ship, and Magruder pounds hopelessly on the door to warn her. Finally he bursts through the skylight to save the day by literally batting the bomb away with his hand at almost the last moment. There's nothing like that to bring two people closer together, and the tale ends with thoughts of spankings mostly forgotten. It's an unpretentious, entertaining story, predictably heavy on accents but in a way fitting the overall lighthearted tone. I couldn't tell from the FictionMags Index whether Gery made a series of Magruder and Heron, but they struck me as characters worthy of an encore appearance.

'No clothed man fled.'

By the late 1930s Short Stories had become Arthur O. Friel's main market in pulps. He wasn't particularly prolific at this time; "Closed Country" (November 25, 1937) was his third and last story published that year, after only one Friel story appeared in all of 1936. I don't know what might have been going on in Friel's life in those years, but "Closed Country" struck me as an unusually hateful story, more preoccupied with racial hierarchy, more contemptuous toward blacks (the N-word is employed) than in other stuff I've read from him. It starts with our unarmed hero, Donovan, bravely trying to face down a black man with a revolver in Friel's usual stomping ground of Venezuela. Donovan is rescued when a stranger intervenes to grapple with the black and snap his neck. "I just didn't like this black bum," the interloper explains, "And I don't like the general idea of a black knocking off a white." He identifies himself as O'Brien, a Swede from Boston. Donovan identifies him as a likely guide for an expedition up the dangerous Rio Caura to where our hero hopes to scout out a route for a future railroad. O'Brien gathers a crew of reliable, manly Venezuelans, little removed from savages themselves in Friel's portrayal yet possessed of skills, a sense of honor, and a strong consciousness of superiority to Indians and other darker peoples. It's pretty hard-boiled stuff until the story veers into slightly more fantastical territory. Donovan has really been hunting for Tom McFarland, the man who swindled his father and reportedly fled into the jungle. He finds this McFarland ruling over some sort of lost race of people who are dark but not quite colored.

For one thing, these Indians looked unusually intelligent; faces longer, brows higher, eyes deeper than those of most aborigines. Also, their dark color was unnatural -- a dull greenish black, blending so softly into the forest shade as to make them almost invisible at a little distance. Although totally nude save for tiny dark clouts, they were so completely dyed that their real color was discernible only when they lay down to drink. Then a beam of sunlight piercing through the forest struck to the base of their thick black hair, disclosing scalp-skin almost white.

McFarland has a theory -- it's hard to tell how seriously we're meant to take it -- that his people are descended from survivors of Atlantis. He compares them favorably to the darker "humanimals" of the region. But he's no racist, really. "I got along by treating niggers and Indians like human beings," he tells Donovan, "They all are. Real niggers and real Indians, I mean. Half-breeds - pfah!"  Damn.... mixed-race people must have had a hard time trying to read pulps, with so many stories telling them they're the bottom of the human barrel. In any event, the ambiguous superiority of these dark-white tribespeople intrigues Friel more than whatever revenge agenda Donovan had, which gets forgotten as he gets to know McFarland better and fights alongside him against an invasion by a "back-bush gang" of "misbegotten mongrels," led by "an apparent white man. Even here, Friel perceives a hierarchy of courage and discipline. When McFarland's men attack, the gang's Indian guides flee as fast as they can swim, while "No clothed man fled." Predictably enough, McFarland dies, as do Donovan and O'Brien's Venezuelan companions, but not before he points Donovan to a fortune that will settle the old man's debt to our hero's father. Friel excels at pitched battles like the one that climaxes this story, and if you can overlook a racism unusually ugly even for pulp fiction "Closed Country" shows that at a relatively late point in his career he could still deliver the blood and thunder. He seems to have had an idea of doing a series with Donovan and O'Brien, but it's unclear from the FictionMags Index whether they ever came back for an encore.

SINGAPORE SAMMY: 'Save the bother,' Lauzanno snapped, 'I'll shuck my own clothes off.'

For Singapore Sammy's last bow (and only cover feature) in Short Stories, George F. Worts reverts to the formula of the second Sammy story. As in "Cobra," "Octopus" (May 10, 1931) makes much of its villain's resemblance to the title animal. Pierre Lauzanno isn't a half-caste, but he's nearly as bad in his author's eyes, "American born, of Portuguese ancestry and Oriental upbringing." While Worts mixes metaphors by giving Lauzanno "the arms of a gorilla," he is a moral octopus in the writer's eyes, "a man who would indulge in any form of murder to accomplish an object." "Octopus" also reproduces the earlier story's motif of partnership between a properly "hard" man and someone whose addictive nature makes him unfit for the life of a South Seas adventurer. The difference this time is that Sammy isn't one of the partners. Instead, back in the burg that gave him his nickname, he encounters a mismatched pair at a crooked card game. One of them, Kelvin Broome, "the Viking," is just like Sammy's protege from the earlier story, only more belligerent; he can't lay off the cards or the booze. The other, "the buccaneer," is virtually another version of Sammy Shea. The improbably named Lucifer "Lucky" Jones will end up being Singapore's sidekick in future stories; he proves a resourceful companion here as the men join forces to avenge Broome, who gets knifed in an alley after the card game breaks up violently. They mean to secure Broome's map of a sunken treasure; finding the treasure, they hope to send it to the dead man's poor family on an Arizona orange grove, to help his sister go to art school. These are the same guys who go around boasting of how "hard" they are, and who we're told are hard by the author. Mush!

Anyway, Singapore and Lucky catch up with Lauzanno and prove just how hard they are by torturing him into giving up the map, with unplanned assistance from an actual octopus that attaches itself to the villain while our heroes are dunking him in the sea. In the middle of this there's a weird moment when Sammy "placed the flat of his hand against a davit and looked at Lauzanno dreamily. Those who had experience knew that this was by far the most dangerous, most sinister expression that the red-haired young man used." I'm sure Worts only means that Sammy's on the brink of going psycho on his antagonist, but given the context of torture, and maybe because I'm a 21st century reader, I can't help reading something even more sinister into our hero's dreamy expression. Despite that, Lauzanno proves a tough egg until the octopus intervenes and makes him beg for mercy. Shay and Jones then make the mistake of letting Lauzanno live.

"Octopus" is the longest of the early Sammy stories, but the way it breaks into nearly equal halves  suggests that Worts (or the editor of Short Stories) may have slammed two novelettes together. The second half of the story becomes a tag-team match as Lauzanno hooks up with the infamous Bill Shay, Sammy's reprobate father, whom the villain tracks down with an alacrity that puts all of Sammy's previous efforts to shame. Things went badly for the old man after we left him at the end of "The Pink Elephant." Held responsible for the sacred title creature's death, Bill was tortured by angry Siamese authorities. Already poised to benefit from Sammy's death according to the will of Sammy's grandfather, Bill, who was previously amused to lead the boy on wild-goose chases, is now out for blood. He and Lauzanno lay in wait while Sammy and Lucky hunt for the treasure, then pounce when the younger men go down in diving suits to retrieve the sunken gold. Worts is good at selling every encounter between Shay the elder and Shay the younger as a big moment, especially when Sammy is shocked to discover Dad in a diving suit attacking him alongside Lauzanno. There's also a very cinematic moment when, in the midst of another intervention by a real octopus, Sammy catches one last glimpse of Bill before the old man zips up to the surface to escape the carnage that consumes Lauzanno, and from which our heroes barely escape. It's an exciting finish to a story that's just slightly overlong, though by modern standards the extra length is put to relatively good use building up Singapore and Lucky's friendship.

From here Worts took Singapore Sammy to Argosy, where he debuted in an eponymous serial in December 1931. As for me, I'll be going back to where I discovered Sammy, in the invaluable Big Book of Adventure Stories, before proceeding to items from my own collection. Of his three major characters -- Peter the Brazen and Gillian Hazeltine are the others -- Worts stuck with Sammy the latest. The conclusion of the 1936 Sammy serial Murderer's Paradise was the effective end of the author's pulp career.

SINGAPORE SAMMY: 'You ain't hard. You ain't smart. You're just a sucker.'

George F. Worts pulls off a nice piece of misdirection in the fourth Singapore Sammy story, "The Pink Elephant." (Short Stories, October 25, 1930). At the same time, he raises the stakes in Sammy Shea's hunt for his reprobate father, since I believe it's established here for the first time that the will which left Sammy his grandfather's fortune, but was stolen by his dad, contains a clause bestowing the estate upon the father in the event of Sammy's death. So just as we get our first real look at Bill Shea, we learn that he has a motive to kill his son. Sammy has tracked him to Siam (the present-day Thailand), where our hero's sob story has earned him the sympathy of a local prince who's equipped him with a handsome entourage of elephants and hunters to find the elder Shea. Early on, Sammy finally tracks has the old man in his sights -- or at least he finds a man who matches the description he depends on, that of a bearded man in the robes of a Buddhist monk, since Sammy himself hasn't seen the guy since he was two years old. After a tense, almost glancing encounter, Sammy is distracted from the chase by his abrupt discovery of the title creature, whom he rescues from crocodiles in a mud pit. The baby pink elephant is a phoouk, a rare and virtually sacred creature in Siam, and on sight of him Sammy is distracted from his potentially parricidal quest by that streak of greed that Worts has already well established. This changes the whole direction of the story, as Sammy realizes that he can earn a literally princely sum by delivering the phoouk to the king. The discovery also changes his relationship to the local prince and his minions, who feel that the pink elephant, being found in their master's territory, is his to deliver to the king, for whatever reward. Sammy understands that his trip to the capital will be dangerous, and that his erstwhile host will likely prove his enemy.

Into this tense situation wanders Sir Lester, a stereotypical Englishman touring the country "lookin' for big cats." His warning that Sammy runs "rather a risk" taking the phoouk all the way to Bangkok makes our hero suspicious. "Sammy looked quickly in Sir Lester's eyes," Worts writes, "saw something there that he did not like." But what else is new? Why wouldn't Sir Lester be just as eager to nab the elephant as anyone else? So Sammy has someone new to worry about -- except that the Englishman is not so new.  After inviting Sammy to sit in a blatant trap and then springing it, Sir Lester reveals himself as Bill Shea. For this one time we can buy that Sammy could be so easily fooled because he hasn't had a good look at his father for so long. Once Sammy identifies him, Bill greets him with, "Smart boy! All you needed to find it out was a moving picture and a full set of directions!" Luckily for our hero, the old man is content to taunt him and steal his elephant.

They told me that you were one dangerous guy to cross. Hell, you ain't hard. You ain't smart. You're just a sucker. I was almost gettin' proud of you -- and then you have to up and pull this stunt. You sucker!...What did I tell you in that letter I sent you when you were in the Singapore Hospital? 'The hand is faster than the naked eye. A wise man knows the aim of a bottle!' I warned you. You're just dumb.

Worts uses the occasion to recap the Sammy series to date from Bill's second-hand point of view before the old man absconds with the phoouk. He's arranged to have Sammy freed some time later, well after Bill and the pink elephant are out of reach -- or so Bill assumes. He hasn't reckoned with the bond Sammy has formed with Bozo, the prince's mighty alcoholic elephant. In the story's silly finish, Sammy steals Bozo from the prince's estate, fuels him up with whisky, overtakes Bill's party and manages to sneak off with the pink elephant. Score one for Sammy Shea! Silly as it is, "Pink Elephant" is a strong entry in the series thanks to its spectacular introduction, four episodes in, of the main villain, who promises to give Sammy still more trouble in the future.

'He go hell, I no can catch!'

Imagine the stories Arthur O. Friel might write about Venezuela in the 21st century: the intrigues of Chavistas, dissidents and military men, Cubans and Americans, etc. Venezuela was Friel's meat. He explored the territory himself and wrote both fiction and non-fiction about it. Friel was one of the star writers for Adventure in the 1920s, but his output slowed over the course of the 1930s, and his work became less ambitious. In 1938 he created the character Dugan, whose exploits are reported by raconteurs addressing the reader in the second person, a favorite Friel device. As noted often here, because most pulp writers were freelancers, their characters were rarely considered the intellectual property of any one publisher. As a result, Dugan could wander back and forth between Adventure, where he first appeared, and Short Stories, where "Under Dog" appeared in the January 25, 1939 issue. The narrator has detailed knowledge of Dugan's exploits, though he doesn't take part in the story he tells. He claims to be a "side-kick" of Dugan, though I suppose he could be Dugan himself, whom he describes as "a husky lad about my size with big fists and no brains." In other words, a conventional tough-guy pulp hero who falls in with a suspicious band of traders after saving an accused thief they'd been shooting at. The lead trader is suspicious because he talks funny: "The words were English -- or North American -- with something a little queer in the long ones." He calls himself Brockley but pronounces it "Broccoli" ("Some kind of wop cabbage," the narrator explains). Brockley's unlikely mission is to bring a consignment of frying pans across the border from Venezuela to Colombia, Dugan has his doubts; the pans will most likely be melted down so the metal can be put to more militant use. He doesn't need the money Brockley offers him, but he hopes to shake "some people who didn't like him" who'd been following him north from some previous adventure. He'd be a minority of one if not for the loyalty of Tonio, the Indian he rescued.

As it turns out, Brockley has firearms very carefully packed within his load of frying pans, and he's set up Dugan to be the fall guy if the sale goes sour. And of course it does go sour, thanks to a German working for the Venezuelan government, who gives Friel the opportunity to write a more blatant accent than Brockley's. It's actually not as extremely vaudevillian as some writers got; the accent is mostly restricted to "ch" for "j" and the occasional hiss. He's about to have Dugan executed for gun-running when Tonio speaks up to exonerate him and explain his own beef with Brockley -- the man who killed his mother and left him to be raised in a squalid Indian village. The unimpressed German's going to shoot everybody anyway, but Dugan and Tonio fight their way out, while Brockley is killed in the crossfire, denying Tonio his revenge. "It's funny, the way wise guys go flop and dumb birds like me and Dugan keep drifting along," the narrator reflects. In fact, Dugan had at least two more stories in him, at least according to the FictionMags Index, one appearing the same month in Adventure. This particular short story is a far cry from the epic stuff Friel wrote in the Twenties, but even late in his career -- his last pulp stories appeared in 1941 -- he had enough juice to make his stuff readably entertaining.

SINGAPORE SAMMY vs 'the toughest egg south of Shanghai'

Still hunting his reprobate father, Singapore Sammy Shea is hunted himself in his third story, "South of Sulu." (Short Stories, June 25, 1930). Ever since word got out that he had brought in the infamous Blue Fire Pearl of Malobar to be appraised, the scum of sea of land have been gunning for him and the pearl. Following a lead on his father, Sammy encounters three such characters on the island of Pelambang. Peddy the trader, stereotypically fat, runs the place. Whisky Wallace is one of his henchman. Their uncomfortable partner is Big Nick Stark, "the toughest egg south of Shanghai," who feels that his cut of the loot to be taken from Sammy doesn't really reflect his contributions to the endeavor. Sammy's no fool and leaves his pearl in a secure location on his boat before setting foot on Peddy's island, where he is predictably ambushed by the terrible trio. They tie him up and threaten torture if he doesn't come across, but with each working at cross purposes against the others Sammy has an opening to escape. Things get pretty hard-boiled as the bad guys threaten to put a lit cigar, a broken bottle, etc. in Sammy's face, but this all proves to be prelude to Sammy's battle of wits with Big Nick. Detecting a double-cross from Peddy, and killing him off-stage, Stark offers to join forces with Sammy, luring the good-but-greedy Singapore with the long-sought mate to the Blue Fire Pearl. Sammy is greedy enough to gamble his pearl against Stark's, and once he agrees to that we remember the scene early in the story where Big Nick impressed Peddy with his fancy shuffling and dealing. Worts knows how to keep things suspenseful by having his bad guys often stay at least a step ahead of Sammy, and he increases readers' anxiety by having Sammy lose at cards to Nick not once, not twice, but thrice -- the last time with his life at stake, since losing obliges Sammy to swim through shark-infested water to get rescuers to their stranded boat.

Stark apparently has an uncanny yet deceptive shuffle that looks guilelessly awkward even to a practiced eye like Sammy's, yet infallibly delivers Big Nick the winning hand. It's a bit of a cheat that Worts never actually explains Nick's technique, but has Sammy finally find proof of his cheating by accident -- he'd left an ace in the box quite by mistake, yet Nick dealt himself four aces. Worts is also wise to give Nick plenty of time to make his spiel, as if trying to wear down the reader's resistance as Nick is trying to wear down Sammy's. And for the hell of it, the antagonists have to forget their differences long enough to get their boat through a nasty storm. It keeps you wondering whether Nick will prove a good egg after all, rather than a mere tough one. "South of Sulu" gives us a likably nasty Sammy instead of the self-righteous con man of the previous story, "Cobra." He gets great tough-guy dialogue, telling Nick that "If you put her aground, one second later your backbone's gonna think an elephant's takin' a walk on it," or that "for the pure pleasure of it, I could turn you into curry of lead." It's still not as good as the original entry, "The Blue Fire Pearl," but you're more likely to keep following Sammy on his quest after this one than after "Cobra." There are two more to go in the first Altus Press volume of Sammy stories, and then I'll jump ahead in time to some later items from my own collection. Stay tuned.

'What this country needs is more Chinese.'

Richard Howells Watkins had a forty-year career writing magazine stories for pulps, slicks and digests. You see his name a lot in the detective and general adventure pulps, usually contributing stories with nautical or auto-racing themes. He was the sort of dependable writer who was nobody's favorite, and perhaps not very memorable today, but usually worth a read. "Two Ways North" (Short Stories, January 25, 1939) deals with smugglers on the Florida coast, though exactly what they're smuggling, or if they're smuggling at all, is open to question most of the way. The story reads almost like a satire of smuggler stories as two men down on their luck dream of earning their way back north by earning a reward for some heroic feat. Denny Coyle, a failed gambler with an Irish brogue, and Jim Bush, a former waiter, are little better than tramps, barely earning a living helping Old Craikie operate a capstan bridge to let boats through. They hope to make some extra coin helping a motorboat "alive with men" that's apparently run aground nearby, but the surly Cuban captain rebuffs them. That makes our heroes suspicious. Jim deduces that the Cuban must be smuggling illegal Chinese immigrants. "These Chinks are bringing us our stake," he tells Denny, suggesting that they blackmail the Cuban with a threat to report him to the government. Since Denny worries about the Cuban knifing the, since "These Cubans live in the present," Jim suggests that they go straight to the government and collect a reward for ratting on the smuggler. Now Denny has a moral objection; it wouldn't be fair to the poor Chinese. The ensuing debate might just as easily take place 78 years later.

"That wouldn't be honest," he stated coldly.
"Why not?" argued Jim, heating up under censure, "He's sneaking a bunch of Chinks into the country, ain't he? Don't he deserve to be caught?"
Denny was like a rock. "Where's the harm in it?" he demanded. "What this country needs is more Chinese."
"Huh?"
"Well do I remember my old man saying, many's the time when he was out of work, 'Twinty two families in the house an' devil a Christian in the lot but wan Jew an' two Chinese.' We'd of starved, I'm tellin' you, if it weren't for a fat yellow grinnin' Chinese that owned a grocery around on Pell Street."
With more energy he added, "An' don't be callin' 'em Chinks. A Jap is a Jap but a Chink is a Chinese, an willin' to be white if ye give him half a chance."

There proves to be an easy solution to this impasse. Once Jim suggests that Ferrer, the Cuban, could be smuggling in a Japanese, Denny jumps to the conclusion that this theoretical person is a spy "comin' in under cover because we're tightening up on some of our bowin' and apologizin' to Jap visitors." The government will really pay out for reporting a spy, he concludes, while Jim argues for quantity over quality, assuming that the feds will pay more for a boatload of Chinese illegals. "Where's your patriotism, man?" Denny protests at this thought. "Up North," Jim answers.

Watkins cleverly avoids making clear whether or not the man our heroes eventually discover is Chinese or Japanese. Sure, the man cries out, "No Jap! Chinese!" before jumping ship, and sure, Denny boasts of his ability to tell Chinese and Japanese apart, but just because "the face was the face of a Chinese if Denny Coyle were any judge," that doesn't mean Denny's any judge. In any event, "the Oriental" turns out to be smuggling diamonds, leading Denny to observe, on his assumption that the "yellow man" was Chinese, that "the Chinese are a clever race -- sometimes too clever, belike!" Diamonds actually draw a pretty good reward that Jim and Denny share equally with Old Craikie, who has also talked of "going North" soon. The end of the story explains the title: Craikie dies moments after putting his share of the bills in his sock. To Denny that means "the old one's further North than you or me will ever get if we go to the pole." Modest as it is, "Two Ways North" may be the best thing I've read from Watkins to date.

'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.

SINGAPORE SAMMY: 'A wise man knows the aim of a bottle'

The second Singapore Sammy story by George F. Worts, "Cobra" (Short Stories, May 25, 1930) takes place "several months" after the events of "The Blue Fire Pearl." By now, it's widely known that Sammy Shay has in his possession that famous bauble, and some people would like to take it off his hands, or from around his neck. The story opens with Sammy, ever on the hunt for his reprobate father, walking into an ambush set by our new villain. He is that most despicable of persons for George F. Worts: the half-caste. "This man was part Portuguese, part Malay, and part God knows what," we learn, "In him, the West met the East and became a power for unlimited malice." The narrator, and in turn Sammy himself, is obsessed with the way the villain resembles a cobra in his "steady, wicked stare." Singapore fights his way free from the ambush but suffers a severe stab wound in the process. If not for a good samaritan who arranges to have him hospitalized with private nursing care, our hero might have died in the street. Once Sammy recognizes his savior, he wants nothing to do with the man.

The man, or "rat" in Singapore's estimate, is Ted McAlister, a onetime protege of Sammy's who couldn't lay off gambling, and couldn't lay off the booze and opium while gambling. It takes a while for Sammy to understand that Ted is on the wagon, except for the gambling that is. He owes $15,000 in chits, proving to Singapore that "You don't belong in China." Ted wants to go back to America and make a fresh start in his dad's business, but can't afford passage with his debts. Now that Sammy owes him something and feels sorry for him, and with his dad's trail gone cold, he works on a way to send the American home while getting his revenge on that human cobra, Armand De Silvio.

Whether you like "Cobra" better than "Blue Fire Pearl" depends on how you like your pulp fiction. Sammy's debut was an all-out action story, while "Cobra" becomes a con-man caper as Sammy uses Ted's own black pearl to con the cobra. He has Ted show the pearl to De Silvio, who runs a jewelry store, and inquire as to whether the half-caste has a matching pearl, for which he'll pay a tremendous price. Sammy then arranges to sell De Silvio the very same pearl Ted showed him, at an inflated price that will more than cover Ted's debts and his passage home. While Sammy comes across as a goody two shoes for much of the story, the way he lectures Ted, he shows a more familiar ruthless streak while working his con. He's going to sell the pearl to De Silvio while disguised as a Hindu. Since he doesn't have a Hindu costume in his wardrobe, he lures some poor mark into an alley, beats him up and takes his clothes. His ultimate revenge on De Silvio is twofold. He has Ted tell him that he no longer wants the matching pearl, meaning that the half-caste has wasted his money. Then, out of a spiteful sense of poetic justice, he throws a real cobra into De Silvio's cashier's cage to terrify the villain into returning the money his men had taken from Sammy at the start of the story.

In an epilogue, a fresh lead puts Sammy back on his father's trail, despite a warning letter in which the old man had told him, "A wise man knows the aim of a bottle." According to Singapore, this is a Siamese saying meaning, in a more contemporary idiom, that "a hunch to a wise guy is plenty." The thought returns to him as the police discuss the cobra attack on De Silvio and express their reluctance to investigate anything having to do with such a dangerous creature. If this story proves anything, it's that Singapore Sammy is not about to take anyone's advice, including his own. His mentorship of Ted McAlister seems to have worked on a "Do as I say, not as I do" level, but you can only teach some people just so much. Sammy can be sentimental about people, as his first adventure showed, but whether that makes him a good guy the way he apparently wanted Ted to be is another story -- or several more to come.

"Sentimental Sammy was a pagan ..."

The Blue Fire Pearl is the first volume of Altus Press's planned complete edition of the Singapore Sammy stories of George F. Worts. The volume is part of Altus's "Argosy Library," but like some previous volumes in this series, the stories actually appeared in another pulp, Short Stories. Sammy did have his best-known run in Argosy and actually made some covers of the venerable weekly, but Worts didn't take him there until late 1931. The five stories in Blue Fire Pearl date from  March 1930 to May 1931, though the copyright information in the e-book backdates them to 1928-29. It's noteworthy in comparison to comic books in particular that pulp publishers didn't often claim series characters as their intellectual property, the great exceptions being the hero-pulp stars like The Shadow and Doc Savage. Characters like Singapore Sammy or W. C. Tuttle's Hashknife Hartley could bounce from magazine to magazine, presumably because the authors were never contract employees of the publishers. In any event, Sammy Shea emerges pretty much fully formed in his debut, "The Blue Fire Pearl" (March 10, 1928), in which Worts shows admirable restraint by not frontloading the story with Sammy's origin. Sammy is a fortune hunter working his way through Asia in search of his father, possibly pulpdom's ultimate deadbeat dad. Shea the elder abandoned Sammy and his mother, taking with him a will that gave Sammy his mother's fortune. Our hero's only clues on his vengeance trail is that Dad was obsessed with pearls and elephants.

Tales of an older man pursuing pearls and elephants take Sammy to Malobar, where he's arrested for invading a temple and slugging a guard, though he only wanted to ask if his father had been there. He becomes the captive of a decadent maharaja whose idea of modernity is an obsession with boxing. With two Americans as his prisoners, the maharaja decides it would be sporting to give them a chance at freedom and a great prize -- the title pearl -- by staging a fight. The winner goes free with the Blue Fire Pearl, while the loser is tossed into a panther pit. Not eager to kill or be killed, Sammy entertains Burke's plan for them to carry each other to a draw before making a break for it with the help of a Chinese boy Sammy has befriended. Worts does a great job keeping us suspicious of Burke's true intentions while emphasizing Sammy's self-interest throughout. Sam Shea is a good guy overall, but Worts makes it clear that he is greedy for that pearl and realistic about his own chances in a real fight with a bigger man, despite a fluke championship in his backstory. As the fight progresses, Sammy realizes that Burke is really out of shape and presumes that he proposed the fix for his own self-preservation. No sooner has he drawn this conclusion, however, than we realize that Sammy has underestimated his possum-playing opponent. Our hero is floored for a seven count, but Burke's treachery and the maharaja's contemptuous prodding ("Get up and fight, you white dog!") only make him mad. Now he's looking for a way to kayo Burke, break free from the ring and steal the pearl -- and, despite himself, to save Burke from execution, because it's the holiday season.

While Worts was also known for his series about defense attorney Gillian Hazeltine and the Peter the Brazen stories (under the pseudonym Loring Brent), his Singapore Sammy stories are by far his best work as far as I'm concerned. They're more hard-boiled and less melodramatic than Worts's other stuff, while Sammy himself is convincingly a good guy without being a goody two shoes. I look forward to reading and reviewing the other stories in the Altus Press collection, and then jumping ahead to some Sammy material from my own collection in the near future. Stay tuned....

'Guess we're outlaws whether we want to be or not.'

In post-pulp days Frank Gruber made good in television. He was a co-creator and credited "Script Consultant" for the Tales of Wells Fargo show, which pitted Dale Robertson's troubleshooter Jim Hardie against outlaws factual and fictional. A hallmark of the show that we presumably can credit to Gruber is its often-sympathetic treatment of the historical outlaws. A totally made-up badman could be totally, irredeemably bad, but when Hardie met the famous ones he often discovered redeeming qualities in them. There's a precedent for that in Gruber's "Young Sam Began to Roam" (Short Stories, April 10, 1940. "Young Sam"is Sam Bass, a bandit portrayed in this story (and in a Wells Fargo episode where Chuck Connors played him) as a relatively happy-go-lucky fellow with no real mean streak in him. Bass reputedly never killed anyone in his brief outlaw career, making him an ideal candidate for the sympathetic treatment. The really noteworthy thing about the story is the narrative trick Gruber plays. He sets the story up as an elegiac remembrance of Sam by a surviving gang member, Eddie Slocum, who settled down and started a family and a ranch. Slocum's memories are provoked by cowboys singing the folk ballad that gives the story its title. The main story has an omniscient narrator rather than Slocum's "I," recounting how Slocum fell in with Sam after getting ripped off by a mining company. Gruber gives us Sam Bass's greatest coup, the $60,000 robbery of a Union Pacific train, and a (made-up?) episode in which the gang cons a town into betting against Sam's legendary superhorse, the Denton Mare, in an impromptu race. Along the way, Slocum meets Ruth, the woman who'll become his wife, but events eventually rush toward the betrayed Bass gang's fatal encounter with the Texas Rangers. The narrative climaxes as Sam sees Slocum take a bullet in the chest, and then we return to the present and learn the truth that adds a tragic tinge to all we'd read before. For it was Eddie Slocum who took a mortal wound that day and was mistaken for Sam Bass, and it was Sam, already poised to quit the outlaw life, who took Eddie's identity and settled down with Ruth. Apparently Ruth knew the truth all along -- she tells Sam that she talked to Slocum before he died -- but this seems to be the first time Sam actually told the whole story. For all intents and purposes Sam Bass the legendary laughing outlaw is dead, for "Slocum" doesn't laugh much anymore, for Eddie was his "heart." Ruth assures him that the long imposture was the right thing to do and okay with her, but that doesn't make the ending any happier. It does, however, end with just the effect Gruber wanted. 

Death is a White Goddess

It made quite an exciting story," Joseph W. Musgrave's novella closes, "the romance of two government agents who fell in love while on a dangerous mission among Congo gun runners." In fact, Musgrave's "Death is a White Goddess" (Short Stories, February 10, 1949) is fairly exciting, but the irony of that closing observation is that Musgrave told the story from the point of view of one of the gun runners. Musgrave wrote only a handful of pulp stories during the late 1940s and early 1950s, but "Goddess" proves him adept at manipulating pulp tropes and expectations. Almost to the end, you expect his narrator to redeem himself and win the leading lady of the piece, but he proves bracingly irredeemable. Dirk Morris has the only boat on an African river, as well as a special relationship with a powerful local chief, and so Tiger Jim Wiley, a has-been celebrity explorer, makes him a partner in a pulpy sort of grift. He's enticed some rich ninny with tales of a white woman raised in the jungle and worshiped as a goddess by the black tribes, and the ninny is paying for an expedition to find her. Dirk's role in the charade is to present the mark with a photo of the goddess in her jungle habitat, as confirmation of Wiley's stories. The picture was posed near Port Nairobi, and the plan is to plant the woman in the photograph, a bar girl who's run away from a stereotypical piggish German, in the wild for the ninny to find. To do this, Wiley needs the chief's permission, which only Dirk can secure. The chief drives a hard bargain for the humiliation his tribe will endure pretending to worship a white woman. He wants a thousand guns, and he has a heap of diamonds to pay for them. Our protagonists become gun runners in short order, buying them from the German and keeping their extra cargo secret from the ninny, a frail fitness buff who seems likely to collapse after one day on safari but does calisthenics the next morning, but not from Wiley's head bearer, who seems too clever to be trustworthy. As things develop, almost everyone in the story is playing a double game, while our gun runners prove themselves Africa's prize saps. All the while you expect Dirk to have a change of heart, but as you near the end you understand that what you might have taken to be Joseph Musgrave's racism as a writer is actually Dirk Morris's vile racism as a character. That's not to say that "Goddess" isn't racist, however. It shows no real knowledge of Africa and a stock witch doctor becomes one of the villains. At the same time, Musgrave invests the long-suffering (and as we learn, doomed) chief with a sense of put-upon honor, and in many small ways he shows that the blacks aren't as stupid as the gun runners assume. It's a very hard-boiled story and the sort of thing you might have seen in paperback rather than pulp at this time, though the revelation of the cynical bar girl as an undercover government agent seems a little too goody-good to be true. It's good enough to make me regret that Musgrave didn't write as much as he did. Check it out for yourself at unz.org.

THE PULP CALENDAR: December 10

Here's a straightforward wartime cover for a 1943 issue of Short Stories, illustrating E. Hoffman Price's lead novelette "According to Plan" -- at 43 pages they may even have called it a novel. Despite the relevance of Price's piece, this issue has a strong Klondike flavor, featuring both the magazine's most popular series, the Halfaday Creek tales of James B. Hendryx, but also Frank Richardson Pierce's wise old sourdough No-Shirt McGee, who abandoned his Argosy birthplace in favor of Short Stories in 1942. You also get short stories by Berton E. Cook and H. S. M. Kemp, an episode of H. Bedford-Jones' sci-fi series "Tales of the Strato-Shooters," and a mystery serial chapter by Harry Bridge. Looks like a pretty good selection for a magazine that was still cranking out 160 pages twice a month in one of pulpdom's most impressive long runs.

THE PULP CALENDAR: November 25

This 1930 number is one of the relatively few issues of Short Stories included in the unz.org pulp trove. The cover's nothing special as far as I'm concerned, and I don't recall having read Robert E. Pinkerton's "complete novel" of approximately 40 pages. Getting past that, however, there's a pretty strong lineup of authors here in an exotic variety of settings, and I was entertained by the stories of Robert Carse (Foreign Legion), Hugh B. Cave (Borneo), Karl W. Detzer (firefighting), Ernest Haycox (western),  Ralph R. Perry (Aleutians) and Sidney Herschel Small (savages in Formosa). You can sample it all at your leisure by following this link.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 25

The 25th usually is Short Stories day each month, and today brings a Short Stories double feature. William Ruesswig painted this nice cover illustrating an adventure of Aubrey St. John Major and Jim the Hottentot in 1931 to promote L. Patrick Greene's latest, "Veldt Gold." It's a strong image I can envision gracing the cover of a future volume in Altus Press's planned complete edition of the Major stories. The folks at Doubleday, Doran liked the cover so much they used it again exactly two years later.

Which issue would I rather have? I'd have to say the 1931 if only because the 1933 issue has been scanned and disseminated to digital collectors already. Neither one is really an all-star issue by today's standards, though the 1931 boasts not only The Major but also James B. Hendryx's two Halfaday Creek heroes, Corporal Downey and Black John Smith, in the conclusion of the serial Corporal Downey Takes the Trail. A lot of people liked Thomson Burtis, too, though I've never really warmed to him.

You can't be too hard on Short Stories about this repetition, because recycling covers really was one of the very few economies the publisher imposed during the Depression. While the magazine's great rival Adventure fluctuated drastically in both page count and frequency, Short Stories chugged along relentlessly, putting out 176 pages twice a month throughout the 1930s and until 1943, excepting a reckless experiment of 224 pages at a time in 1932. You still got more content in a month's worth of Argosy weeklies and paid less -- 40 or 50 cents for Argosy as opposed to 50 cents for a month of Short Stories --  but you didn't get much better value anywhere else.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 25

Here's an unusual color scheme for a 1934 Short Stories cover that eschews the magazine's trademark red sun for a blood-red background to a sharply contrasting black and white image of a frightened man. It heralds a "complete novel" (50 pages) by Walter C. Brown, a leading pulp orientalist. The magazine goes on more familiar terrain in James B. Hendryx's latest Halfaday Creek novelette featuring Black John Smith. Some more familiar names in this issue are Berton E. Cook, Hapsburg Liebe and Robert H. Rohde. Reginald C. Barker and Edward T. Turner contribute short stories while Roy Vickers completes the serial Nothing But Diamonds. "Dan Edwards' Bunk Detail" was a nonfiction column that had been running since November 1933 and would continue through the end of 1934. It's not exactly an all-star lineup for Short Stories, though Hendryx may have been their most popular author, but that cover definitely would have gotten browsers' attention.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 10

L. Patrick Greene's Aubrey St. John Major, aka "The Major," may have been portrayed more often on the cover of Short Stories, his second home after his early years in Adventure, than any other series character. Here he is in 1934, as painted by cover artist/gun columnist K. H. Kuhlhoff.  Greene's novelette "By Rule of Drum" isn't the longest piece in the issue; that honor goes to W. C. Tuttle's novella "Flames of Fate," while Roy Vickers' serial chapter is also longer. But The Major is clearly the star of this issue, which also features a story by multigenre master Murray Leinster and work from such lesser-known names as Reginald C. Barker, Frank J. Leahy, Patrick O'Keefe, George Rosenberg (aka George Armin Shaftel) and Edward T. Turner.  The Major's busiest years as a cover subject, running up to the end of the decade, actually were yet to come.

THE PULP CALENDAR: August 25

You can think of this 1932 pulp as Short Stories' victory lap. Back in March of that year, the Doubleday, Doran magazine increased its page count from 176 to a monstrous 224, with the obvious purpose of topping the 192 pages of its twice-a-month competitor, Adventure. Whether Short Stories had anything to do with it or not, in August Adventure cracked, cutting its page count in half while cutting its price from a quarter to a dime. Perhaps not coincidentally, this proved to be the last 224 pager for Short Stories. It reverted to 176 pages the following issue, September 10, and held that ground for another decade, all the while grinding out two issues a month long after Adventure had gone permanently monthly. But if the Aug. 25 issue as a whole is a victory lap, its "book-length novel," J. D. Newsom's A Man Stands Alone, was an 87 page slam dunk. I don't know how big the typeface was during this period, or how many lines there were to a column, but 87 double-column pages pretty much is a book-length novel -- and probably a good one, as Newsom was one of the top Foreign Legion writers. The rest is gravy: the conclusion of a Robert Ormond Case serial; novelettes by R. V. Gery and Ladbroke Black; short stories by Leo F. Creagan, Douglas Leach, Robert E. Pinkerton and Sewell Peaslee Wright. That's not quite the all-star lineup Adventure could publish at its best, and I don't know if I'd call them "All headliners," but in 1932 it would do quite nicely.

THE PULP CALENDAR: August 10

Of the "big four" general-interest adventure pulps, Short Stories seems to have depended the most on series characters when promoting itself. You could argue that Argosy hyped its star characters as eagerly, but I don't recall seeing the venerable weekly beat its chest the way Short Stories does over having four popular recurring characters in this 1933 issue. It is a formidable lineup, even if you don't count W. C. Tuttle's Hooty McLoon, who doesn't even rate a mention as a series character in the Fiction Mags Index. Clarence Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy is clearly the star, and some people today may still recognize the name. But L. Patrick Greene's Major, the African diamond buyer -- always accompanied by his capable sidekick Jim the Hottentot -- is another pillar of pulp fiction, and James B. Hendryx's Corporal Downey may have been pulpdom's most popular "Northwest" character until Black John Smith and the denizens of Halfaday Creek took over Hendryx's spotlight. Meanwhile, Vincent Starett's Jimmy Lavender had been a Short Stories mainstay since 1922, though this issue would prove to be his last appearance in the twice-a-month magazine. And that's not all! You also get a serial chapter from Jackson Gregory, a sea story by B. E. Cook and the "Mandarin Dagger" novella by Lemuel de Bra that apparently justified reusing a classic Duncan McMillan yellow-peril cover from February 1932. You'd think that while you were trumpeting new stories with all these popular characters you'd spring for a new cover that might show one or two of them. But I guess Short Stories, which had broken Adventure by expanding to 224 pages the previous year and would maintain a relentless twice-a-month schedule until 1949, had to economize somewhere, sometime.