THE PULP CALENDAR: March 13

If that's Bulldog Drummond on the cover of this 1937 Detective Fiction Weekly, he's a lot more handsome than his creator, H.C. "Sapper" McNeile described him. But so were Ray Milland and John Howard, the actors who played Drummond in a series of Paramount B-movies at the time this issue was published.  DFW had last published a Bulldog Drummond serial in 1929, perhaps to exploit the Ronald Colman movie of that year. After McNeile's death later this year, DFW would publish three Drummond short stories, followed by Gerard Fairlie's continuation of the series the following year. On the evidence of this first installment you probably won't get the kind of exuberant outrageousness I recall from the original Drummond novel. While the Drummond serial clearly was meant to be this number's highlight, for me the highlight was -- was since this issue has been scanned and is available online --  the Foreign Legion mystery by the dependable Robert Carse. Nothing else really impressed me, though fans of Ray Cummings, Frederick C. Davis and Fred MacIsaac may want to download this issue.

THE PULP CALENDAR: March 12

This 1932 Argosy marked Tarzan's return to the venerable weekly after eight years. Argosy, of course, was the sister publication and heir to the All-Story where the Ape Man made his very first appearance in 1912. For most of his history, Tarzan swung back and forth between the Munsey pulps (All-Story and Argosy) and the McCall story magazines, Blue Book and Red Book. Edgar Rice Burroughs presumably went with the highest bidder each time; he'd take Tarzan back to Blue Book later in 1932, and in 1933 the Ape Man would finally appear in a slick, that being Liberty. Tarzan would return to Argosy in 1936, 1938 and 1941. Burroughs placed a lot of other stories in the weekly in between.

I'm at a bit of a loss with the rest of the issue because the Fiction Mags Index doesn't know what's in it, and no one seems to be selling a copy with an interest in listing the contents. We can at least figure out the other serials by looking at the previous and subsequent issues. This number features part two of Thomson Burtis's Texas air serial, Soldiers of the Storm, and part four of F. V. W. Mason's Captain Renegade. A quick flurry of research revealed that sci-fi pioneer Murray Leinster has a story this week called "Nemesis." Beyond that, we have a "Camel Corps" novelette and a "South Seas" novelette. "Camel Corps" may mean Foreign Legion, and that may mean Robert Carse or J. D. Newsom, though if it were Georges Surdez I think they'd mention him on the cover. "South Seas" could well mean my man Bellow Bill Williams, but there were a lot of South Seas specialists. For now,the only way to find out may be to buy a copy, but with Tarzan on the cover it would definitely cost you.

THE PULP CALENDAR: March 11

There's something cool, in some sense of the word, to Street & Smith's 1939 pulp covers, something at odds with the circus-poster quality of some pulps. Norman Saunders's cover for this Wild West Weekly isn't exactly cool in the minimalist manner of many '39 covers, but it's vividly striking in its own way, and once again keeping the cover copy to a minimum only helps the art do its work. Regular readers of this more junior mag (compared to Western Story) would find mostly familiar faces, though Walker Tompkins' Firebrand (no relation to George Challis's Tizzo) was a new character. He'd appear in the next five issues, but the Fiction Mags Index doesn't consider the Firebrand saga a serial. The only non-series character story this issue is Ralph Yergen's "Pardner of the Wild Trails," but the recurring characters presumably were Wild West's calling card. Other western pulps had series characters -- what author wouldn't want that sort of meal ticket? -- but they defined Wild West Weekly more than any other.

THE PULP CALENDAR: March 10

This 1935 issue of Short Stories is available at unz.org, which means I've actually read a good amount of it. Unfortunately I read what I did of this issue long enough ago that I don't remember anything that vividly. The highlight, of course, is L. Patrick Greene's "Decoy," the latest adventure of Aubrey St. John Major and Jim the Hottentot in Africa. I've read some of the earliest Major stories but the later ones from this period are better because the Major doesn't lay the fake-fop act on so thick so often and Jim has developed more of a heroic personality in his own right. This particular issue has what are arguably the magazine's two most popular series in it: not only the Major but James B. Hendryx's series about the denizens of Halfaday Creek in the Yukon, where outlaws can find a safe haven if they behave themselves but the really bad people find themselves outwitted and cleaned out by Black John. As the cover advertises, Eustace L. Adams has a novelette in this issue, but as I recall, "The Jaguar's Cub," about a father-son reunion in the middle of a Central American uprising, isn't on the level of the stuff Adams was selling to Argosy at this time. Another writer I like, Frank Richardson Pierce, has a short story in this number, but I must confess that the .pdf of "Snatchers" sits on my e-reader unread to date, though now that I've let this date go by I'll rectify the error as soon as possible. Berton E. Cook contributes a decent sea story while Carl N. Taylor, whose career ended abruptly with his murder in 1936 -- the cult film Lash of the Penitentes was inspired by the case -- writes a premonitory tale of Japanese up to mischief in the Philippines. There's also a dangerous-job story by Carmony Grove, a comic western by Ellis Parker Butler, and a serial chapter by a real old timer, septuagenarian Frank H. Spearman. While the Adams story is a disappointment, this issue is a pretty good sampler of the kind of settings and subject matter Short Stories could offer. You can download individual stories from the issue by following this link.

THE PULP CALENDAR: March 9

Judging by the hand, that's a big vault of death Erle Stanley Gardner's writing about in this 1935 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly. Gardner gets the cover story, but that ugly little strip on top of the cover suggests that Eugene Thomas's Vivian LeGrand was fast becoming a star of the magazine. "The Episode of the Levantine Monster" was the Lady From Hell's sixth appearance already in 1935. Meanwhile, "The Mute One" is the fourth appearance of Richard Sale's Daffy Dill. This issue continues a memoir of "15 Years in the Underworld" by one Frisco Jimmy Harrington, and wraps up the "Donald Ross" (aka Fred MacIsaac) serial Bring Him Back Alive!  Edmond duPerrier and sci-fi specialist Ray Cummings contribute short stories. Frisco Jimmy and Vivian LeGrand would be back the following week.

VINTAGE PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: George Bagby, GIVE THE LITTLE CORPSE A GREAT BIG HAND (1953)

That's a cute cover by Victor Kalin. The back cover copy tops it. I don't think they write them like that anymore.

George Bagby was one of the several pseudonyms used by Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985). Bagby was his most prolific alias and a character in his own stories, the narrator of the exploits of his friend "Schmitty," or Inspector Schmidt of the NYPD. Give the Little Corpse a Great Big Hand is the first Bagby/Schmidt book I've read and it was quite enjoyable in an easy, undemanding way. In this one, Schmitty has two mysteries to solve: the smothering of the stripper and a burglary spree coincidental with the opening of the nightclub where the stripper is smothered. We're dealing with that old crime chestnut where a gangster attracts high society to some big event so his boys can rob their homes while they're out. You may ask why high society has come out to see a stripper, but the gangster has hired a singer -- a policeman's daughter, even, and with real talent -- to give the occasion class. Since the nightclub's new proprietor is a known gangster, there's little mystery to the burglaries. The overriding mystery is whether the killing of the stripper has anything to do with the burglary plot. Schmidt doesn't think so; the gangster's response to the stripper's sudden death is too spontaneous, too panicked, to be part of a planned alibi. The murder investigation brings out a high-society rivalry for the singer's affections and the stripper's dysfunctional relationship with her alky mom, now her daughter's maid and dresser. The old lady seems to be one step ahead of everyone else until she gets killed, too. Her death keeps the mystery plot fresh, but the writing is good enough to make this an entertaining page-turner. There's a certain ruefulness to Bagby's descriptions that retains enough sentiment not to be world-weary or cynical, and on this first evidence for me he can write quite the opening paragraph. This one describes the venue for the story:

If you ask around in Time Square, at Lindy's and at Sardi's and around the Astor lobby, you'll turn up people who may remember it when it was the Limehouse Club. It's been so many things since then, the Lotus Bud and the Northern Lights and the Foreign Legion. The Broadway boys will tell you it's a bad-luck spot. The location and the layout are beautiful, but the history is bad. It goes all the way back to early Prohibition days and there's always been one night club or another there, but none of them has lasted. Whatever the name under which it operates, it is always the place where the angels go to have their wings clipped, but mysteriously there are always fresh angels. Each failure, each shutdown, each collapse is invariably followed by another hopeful venture. A change of name, a change of management, a change of decor, but never any basic change in the same old gilded dump.

The whole first chapter is great, from its efficient introduction of the cast to Bagby's descriptions of a glorified burlesque show playing to a too-hip crowd that finds the gross comic ironically and thus unintentionally funny. "It takes a special sort of mind to be amused by a confusion between Pharaoh and fairy," narrator Bagby observes, and while the audience isn't that special they find the climactic striptease -- the stripper makes it through the first performance -- hilarious in an obviously camp way. I appreciate that kind of sociocultural observation just about as much as the mysteries in such books. Since the other Bagby book in my collection, The Real Gone Goose, deals with beatniks, I look forward to enjoying it, whether the humor is intentional or not.

THE PULP CALENDAR: March 8

I'm cheating today. No March 8 pulps looked that good to me, so here's a slick -- wider, taller and glossier, though not thicker -- from 1930. But as you can see from Collier's choice of cover story, the line separating pulp fiction from slick fiction grows blurry at times. "The National Weekly" had been Dr. Fu Manchu's American home since 1913, and with very rare deviations he kept Collier's as his base of operations until 1948. Sax Rohmer's fiction probably strikes folks as "pulp" but he was too popular to be relegated to the rough-paper press. As I've mentioned a few times, Collier's, along with The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty and a few others, was where pulp authors aspired to be published. In this particular issue you'll find a short story by Alan LeMay, the future author of The Searchers, who had established himself in Adventure before cracking Collier's back in 1929. Another noteworthy author in this number is Richard Connell, best known as the founder of an entire subgenre of adventure story as the writer of "The Most Dangerous Game." There's also plenty of fiction bearing little resemblance to pulp, though by modernist literary standards slick-magazine fiction was barely more respectable and probably less entertaining than pulp. Pulp writers didn't necessarily improve when they graduated to slicks like Collier's. Some authors -- Harold Lamb, Ernest Haycox, Albert Richard Wetjen and Sidney Herschel Small are a few -- produced good short stories for the National Weekly, while others -- Max Brand, Frederick Nebel, George F. Worts, etc. -- produced relatively lifeless work. Collier's didn't quite outlive the pulps. It went biweekly in 1953 and folded at the end of 1956 in the middle of a Luke Short serial. You can take a look at this particular issue, albeit with all the color illustrations and ads greyscaled, at unz.org.