THE PULP CALENDAR: September 22

This 1934 Argosy is part of the unz.org pulp trove and gives me an excuse to a piece I wrote a couple of years ago about the cover story, Theodore Roscoe's "That Son of a Gun, Columbo." It's an early example of Roscoe's fascination with the Caribbean undead as well as a perhaps unpatriotic account of Christopher Columbus. Speaking of the dead, this issue concludes George F. Worts' Peter the Brazen serial Kingdom of the Lost in stunning fashion, with the death of Peter's longtime love Susan O'Gilvie. Readers in 1934 may have known already, however, not to trust an author's account of a death plunge like the one Susan takes without confirming a dead body at the bottom. They may not have been surprised to see Worts take it back and explain how Susan survived in the final Peter story, published the following year. Meanwhile, A. Merritt continues his long, long awaited (and final) serial Creep, Shadow!, while W. Wirt continues a Jimmie Cordie three-parter, The Assassin. Erle Stanley Gardner contributes a Jax Bowman novelette, John H. Thompson puts his comic drifters Bill and Jim through another wringer and Jay Lucas offers a tale of the Himalayas, "Shula Set." Sample the issue at your leisure using this link. We'll stay in 1934 for the next two Thursdays so I can show off some more Argosy from my own collection -- including the return of Bellow Bill Williams on October 6!

THE PULP CALENDAR: June 29

Here's the next 1935 Argosy on my to-read pile. As you might guess from the condition of the cover, this is one I bought for completist purposes only, to have all of George F. Worts's Shark Bait and more of F. V. W. Mason's Lysander of Chios. In pursuit of Lysander I've ended up with all of Kevin Johnson's The Marines Having Landed. Johnson is something of a mystery, here making his Argosy and pulp-fiction debut, at least under that name. He would publish two more short stories in 1935 and that was it for his pulp career. Would Argosy run a serial by a complete newcomer and give him a cover? My doubts on that score lead me to suspect that "Johnson" was a pseudonym, though the Fiction Mags Index takes the name at face value. But let's see what else we have this week:

The June 29 issue concludes Hulbert Footner's Sink of Iniquity, the opening installments of which have been pretty good. Theodore Roscoe has the issue's only novelette, while Jack Allman does a polar tale and William Merriam Rouse continues his long-running series of stories set in Bildad Road, in the Adirondacks of New York. The back cover has the same ad as the June 22 issue, so I'll skip that. Instead, I present this issue's "Men Who Make the Argosy," biography, in which Theodore Roscoe submits to an interview from several of his favorite creations.

THE PULP CALENDAR: June 16

The June 16, 1934 issue was the first Argosy I bought for myself. It was a matter of opportunity more than anything else; here was an Argosy at an affordable price from the period I had come to like from reading the issues at unz.org. It isn't really one of my favorite issues. Theodore Roscoe's lead novelette "Lady of Hades" is okay. If I recall right -- I don't have the magazine in front of me right at the moment -- we have a jewel thief trying to convince a boatload of rival thieves that he doesn't have the prize they've all been seeking, and a romance involving the boat captain's ill-treated daughter. I was glad to see Sinclair Gluck's name on the cover when I bought it because I'd liked his later Dan Brice stories, but "Secrecy," a tale of Middle Eastern intrigue, proved a disappointment. It just seemed dull to me. W. C. Tuttle's short story "Romances and Racehorses" is pure comedy and I found it purely hateful. As for the serials, Eustace L. Adams closes out The Terror with an atypical thud, F. V. W. Mason's The Barbarian is pretty good to the limited extent that I've read it, and part two of Frank Richardson Pierce's Picture Rock is at least promising, though as the only installment of five that I've read it can be no more than that. Later I would know which issues I actually wanted and I would know where to go to have an actual choice of what to buy.