THE PULP CALENDAR: February 11

What would a Pulp Calendar be without at least one appearance of the Yellow Peril? Orientals fascinated pulp writers and readers. The problem with the way pulp portrayed Asians was that they went to opposite extremes, portraying them either as gibbering morons, usually as comedy relief, or (and usually more often) as sinister sadists. There was an alluring ambiguity to the pulp Oriental, since pulp never seemed quite as certain of Asians' inferiority as they were about other racial groups. But pulp was still just as racist towards Asians as it often was toward other groups because writers rarely imagined an ordinary guy or dame who just happened to be Asian. The whole point of having an Asian in your story, most of the time, was to indulge in fantasies of Otherness, which in the case of Asians often meant fantasies of setting aside American morality and getting away with murder, as often happens in stories set in Chinatown in which the murderer is the hero, if only because he kills someone even worse, as in the works of Walter C. Brown or Arden X. Pangborn. One can go too far the other way, of course, in refusing to imagine the possibility of Otherness on the assumption that people everywhere are essentially the same in all ways that count. That approach can result in a certain blandness of pop fiction, and in the meantime our fantasies of Otherness have been transferred to the paranormal ghettos of so many fictional cities, where vampires, werewolves, faeries and others play the roles for 21st century readers that the archetypal Chinaman played for our grandparents and great-grandparents. Once it became bad form to define people by Otherness, while people still dreamed and fantasized about it, Otherness had to become literally inhuman in order to endure in print.

I assume that this 1939 DFW cover illustrates the Norbert Davis story, though the title, "Ideal For Murder," gives away nothing. More interesting for me would be the Richard Sale novelet, "Guns For Spain." Pulp regarded the Spanish Civil War with some ambivalence, since it pitted fascists against leftists. Depending on how threatened an author felt by the Germans and Italians, one could take a "plague on both your houses" approach to the conflict, allowing maximum freedom of action for a freebooting hero. I'd be interested in seeing Sale's angle on the war, even though this story may well take place entirely outside Spain. Along with these featured stories, Judson Philips wraps up a serial and William R. Cox, a writer I identify with westerns, contributes a short story, as do Robert Arthur, William E. Brandon and one E. O. Umsted. The Fiction Mags Index doesn't give a cover credit but I like the tastefully lurid look of the thing. It isn't barking mad looking like the horror pulps of the period, but it still says "pulp" to me.

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 10

Here's a Short Stories from 1932, spotlighting a Foreign Legion novel, apparently set in China, by one of the genre's masters, J. D. Newsom. I'll have more to say about Newsom when I show you my Feb. 16, 1935 Argosy, but let me assure you that giving him the cover story probably makes this Short Stories worth getting all by itself. Notice how the cover copy emphasizes the globetrotting scope of the magazine's contents. Sometimes Short Stories is too heavy on westerns, but that's not the case here. Among the other authors R. V. Gery,who has a novelet, and Sinclair Gluck, who's in the middle of a serial, are solid if not top-tier writers. This is an ambitious period for the twice-monthly pulp. Little more than a month from this date, Short Stories would expand to a whopping 224 pages, making it bigger than the 192 page Adventure. At the end of August, Short Stories retreated back to its previous 176 page size, but at that same time Adventure suddenly shrunk by half, to 96 pages; it went monthly the following year. If the Short Stories plan had been to break Adventure by intensifying their biweekly competition at the trough of the Depression, it seems to have worked. Short Stories stayed "Twice a Month" until 1949.

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 9

This 1935 Argosy is one of the rattier items in my pulp collection. I acquired it in part because it has a chapter of one of George Challis's Firebrand serials, but mainly because it had the opening installment of another serial, Eustace L. Adams's Anywhere But Here. Adams was an action writer who more or less specialized in aviation stories, though he could do without the flying quite nicely. Anywhere But Here is a buddy story about two fliers who cut quite a swath through Latin America back in the day, having helped out with a revolution or two. Al Burke and Bat Gillespie had had enough of soldiering-of-fortune and had moved to New York, only to be dragged back to the nation of San Lorenzo, whose president they'd helped to install, to look after an American company's interests that are being challenged by French and German rivals. Complicating matters are Al's kid sister Mickey, now a famous aviatrix in her own right, who to Al's alarm is falling in love with Bat, and Carmencita, a San Lorenzo lady over whom Al and Bat had been romantic rivals in the past. These are all hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-boiled folks, for all the romance that develops, and Adams strikes just the right tone for this sort of story. I've liked a lot of what I've read from Adams and I may do you a favor and scan the serial into a little novel you'll all probably enjoy. But let's look at what else is inside this issue:

As was often the case in this period, Frederick Faust has multiple stories in an Argosy, including the Challis serial and the cover story under his most famous pseudonym. Max Brand's "Rifle Pass" is a meandering "complete novel" of 36 pages in which a sheriff's underachieving son is deputized in order to pressure him into proving himself by catching a notorious outlaw. The son has skills but hardly seems to give a damn about anything, and is soon suspected of turning outlaw himself. Western fans can probably figure where this is headed but it's a fair page-turner just the same.

As for the rest, Faust's great rival for productivity, H. Bedford-Jones, contributes a short story about his old series character, the Cockney detective John Solomon, while Theodore Roscoe's "He Floats Through the Air" is a grim little circus story about a paranoid aerialist. H. H. Matteson's "Perils Loose on Memamloose" is a comical tale of the Aleutians in which a white man's awful cornet playing stirs up the natives, and Jack Allman's "High Rigger" is a standard, readable lumberjack story. This issue covers a lot of territory and all of it feels like pulp rather than rejects from the slicks like a lot of latter-day Argosy. I'm not the most knowledgeable Argosy fan but my feeling is that 1935 saw the venerable weekly at its peak. I plan to submit more evidence for this claim over the next few Tuesdays. There are 23 1935 Argosy issues in the unz.org trove so feel free to explore for yourself before coming back here for more.

This issue of Argosy is sponsored by:

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 8

Another dynamic H. W. Scott cover catches the eye for this 1941 issue of Western Story. The main attraction inside is a 40+ page Walt Coburn novelet. The famed "cowboy author" would become omnipresent once Western Story went monthly in 1944, but at this point you could still go three or four weeks at a time without seeing Coburn. That matters because by some point in the Forties Coburn was past his prime. I've read some stuff of his from the late Forties that borders on the incoherent, but "Montana Rep" is closer in time to some still-decent stories he wrote for Argosy in 1940. William Colt MacDonald, creator of the Three Mesquiteers, one of whom was played by John Wayne when the Duke was still paying his dues, has a serial in this number. Harry F. Olmstead is probably the best known of the other authors this week. I think I'd prefer something from Popular Publications in this period, but Street & Smith's covers make their westerns look more attractive at first glance.

From My Collection: BLUE BOOK, September 1935

Blue Book probably was always the classiest of pulp magazines. It certainly was the most lavishly illustrated. Its cover stock seems to be thicker than that of most pulps, and the page edges are trimmed to eliminate the rough edges and overhangs typical of pulp. Blue Book was published by the McCall company as a companion to Redbook, which then was much more fiction-oriented than it is today. It defied the dwindling trend of many rival pulps. While this 144 page 1935 issue represents a reduction in size from 160 pages earlier in the decade, the magazine would expand dramatically to 192 pages in 1939. Blue Book went bedsheet in September 1941, and if you still want to call it a pulp at that point, then it became probably the most beautiful pulp ever produced. If the bedsheet Argosy of 1941 metamorphosed into a moth, then Blue Book was Mothra. It helped to have an unmatched stable of interior illustrators -- not to mention iron man cover artist Herbert Morton Stoops, who moonlighted inside as Jeremy Cannon -- some of whose work you'll see as I begin to scan stories from this issue. Speaking of that, what have we to choose from?

Blue Book was unafraid to credit writers with more than one story per issue. One of their star writers, William Makin, scores twice this time with two series characters, the British Intelligence agent known as the Red Wolf of Arabia and the gypsy detective Isaac Heron. H. Bedford-Jones didn't like to see his name more than once on a contents page, no matter what Blue Book's policy was. That doesn't matter here since this is a Jones-lite issue by Blue Book standards. In a good month -- for him -- you might see stories under his most popular aliases, Gordon Keyne and Michael Gallister. A Bedford-Jones series might range all over history in search of tales to fit his theme of the moment. However prolific he was, you could depend on his for variety and solid story construction. Another Blue Book star, Robert R, Mill, starts a new series about G-Men this issue. He was best known for his more enduring series about "Tiny" David, a New York State Trooper who proved more clever than his oafish appearance suggested. From 1935 to 1938, Blue Book's flagship writer was William L. Chester, their in-house Edgar Rice Burroughs. Blue Book and Argosy competed for Burroughs stories constantly, and this issue announces a Tarzan story for the next issue, but Burroughs was flighty and pricey. Chester gave them a secure twist on the Tarzan formula with Kioga of the Wilderness, a white youth raised in a lost Native American tribe in the far north who had increasingly fantastical adventures during Chester's meteoric career.

As for the rest of this issue's contributors, I discovered Sidney Herschel Small through his Collier's stories in the unz.org trove. His specialty was the adventures of white people in Asia or in American Chinatowns. While they may not be "politically correct" by current standards, Small's stories were far less offensive than a lot of pulp chinoiserie, and they're usually crisply entertaining. Short novel contributor Leland Jamieson wrote a series of adventures about Coast Guard fliers, and "The Pirate of Vaca Lagoon" is quite a good one, as well as numerous flying stories before dying way too young of pancreatic cancer in 1941. William MacLeod Raine was a western writer whose career dated back to the 19th century and continued into the early 1950s. "The Triple Flip" is the first and only Blue Book appearance by Laurence Jordan, who published about a dozen stories overall in the first half of the 1930s. The "Prize Stories of Real Experience" are usually pretty entertaining, too, whether the stories were real or not.

To my mind, Blue Book sometimes got a little too high-toned or Anglomaniacal for its own good, but true pulp was always close to the surface, and you'll see some samples of what I mean in the near future as I scan stories from September 1935 for your convenience. Until then, this issue of Blue Book was brought to you by...

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 7

Paul Stahr's cover isn't the most dynamic Argosy has run, but it rightly calls attention to one of Robert Carse's Foreign Legion stories. Foreign Legion is one of my favorite pulp genres (and you can find many samples of it at this blog), and while Georges Surdez is the undisputed master of that genre it's a close race, as far as I'm concerned, between Carse and J. D. Newsom for runner-up. Carse was just great at tough stories of endurance under stress; he could do prison or Devil's Island stories just as well. Until he started to get romantic and propagandistic at the end of the 1930s, Carse could hardly do wrong, and one of his novelets will likely put an Argosy or other pulp on my shopping list. This one is in the middle of a Frank Richardson Pierce serial, which probably is another plus, and another serial featuring J. U. Geisy and Junius B. Smith's Semi-Dual, a Persian occult investigator whose adventures had been appearing since 1912. Ralph Milne Farley wraps up yet another serial while William Corcoran starts a two-parter, The Death Ride, and gets a self-profile in the occasional "Men Who Make the Argosy" column. Lt. John Hopper, James Perley Hughes, Harold Bradley Say and John H. Thompson contribute short stories. I'm not sure if that adds up to "Action Stories of Every Variety," but it probably comes quite close.

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 6

There's nothing about this 1943 issue of Wild West Weekly except that it's the last weekly issue. Going into 1943, Street & Smith still had three weekly titles: Wild West, its more mature stablemate Western Story, and its flagship romance title Love Story. They had outlasted Munsey's rival weeklies by more than a year, but wartime paper needs, I presume, put the kibosh on pulp weeklies for good. All three weeklies carried the same publication date. Western Story put out one more weekly issue on February 13, but it's unclear from the Fiction Mags index when Love Story's last weekly number appeared. The westerns then went on hiatus for the rest of February. Wild West's first biweekly issue has a March 13 cover date, followed by Western Story on March 20. Western Story would continue until Street & Smith wiped out most of its pulp line in 1949, but this was the beginning of the end for Wild West. It became a monthly in September and the November 1943 issue was its last. Western Story, converted to digest format, continued on a biweekly schedule until February 1944 before going monthly. The Feb. 6 Wild West Weekly features two series characters, Chuck Martin's Rawhide Runyan, a recent arrival who first saw print in 1938, and Paul S. Powers's Johnny Forty-Five, credited to Andrew A. Griffin, who dated back to 1930. Familiar authors Lee Bond, Hapsburg Liebe and Walker A. Tompkins also have stories in this milestone issue. Our ancestors were a mighty breed of reader to keep up with the weeklies and even the biweeklies of pulp's golden age, or else they simply had fewer alternatives or distractions. In some ways I envy them.