PULP READING: Robert Carse, "ADIOS," ARGOSY, April 7, 1934

Do a Google search for Robert Carse and it'll define him as primarily a nautical writer. That may more accurately describe his postwar career, but before World War II Carse (1902-71) was a versatile pulpster, many if not most of whose stories took place on dry land. He started out as a Great Lakes sailor, but after dabbling in journalism he tried his luck in the pulps and aimed for the top. His first published story, according to the Fiction Mags Index, appeared in Adventure in December 1925. He soon made his way into Sea Stories, but by the end of the Twenties war stories emerged as his specialty. He didn't appear in Argosy until the summer of 1930, but it soon became his primary pulp market. There he specialized in Foreign Legion stories and Devil's Island type stories. His 1934 story "Roll and Go," available at unz.org, is exceptional for being a more realistic, sympathetic take on the Great Depression, possibly inspired by the movie Wild Boys of the Road, and it may be one of the few hints in pulp of leftist sympathies that got Carse's name mentioned a few times by the House Un-American Activities Committee. His work does take an anti-fascist turn, possibly along "Popular Front" lines, in the later Thirties, but whether that made him a "premature anti-fascist" I can't say. When the war came Carse, in his fortieth year, joined the Merchant Marine and saw highly dangerous service on the Murmansk Run. Returning from the war, he continued to publish in Adventure and Blue Book but concentrated more on novels and non-fiction. If there were suspicions about his ideology or loyalty, they didn't keep him from getting published in conservative establishment magazines from The Saturday Evening Post to Boy's Life in later years.

"Adios" is more cynical than political. It concerns an old American mercenary who considers himself retired from the wars, but just when he thought he was out .... Old Man Anderson is manipulated by different factions vying for control of a Latin American country, but when their schemes inflict collateral damage on Anderson's friends, he decides to be a plague on both their houses. It's a brisk read at 13.5 pages and shows Carse in good pulp form. Here's a directory of Carse's Argosy stories and serial chapters available at unz.org, and you can add "Adios" to that by following the link below.

Robert Carse, "Adios,"

ARGOSY, April 7, 1934

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 11

I'm getting to like the cover designs on early-1930s issues of Street & Smith's Detective Story. Like their late-Thirties western covers, these benefit from a lack of verbiage, to the point where this and many contemporary issues aren't even promoting any of the stories inside. That's all right with me since I know none of the authors in this particular issue, with a particularly tempting cover, except Barry Perowne, an English author (writing pseudonymously) whose main gig was as the authorized chronicler of E. W. Hornung's archetypal gentleman thief, Raffles, after Hornung's death. His story, the second installment of a three-part serial reprinted from the English story paper The Thriller, introduced Perowne's own creation, J.L. "Rick" LeRoy, who continued to appear sporadically through the Thirties. You'll notice that Street & Smith is more interested in promoting The Shadow, who in April 1931 graduated from mysterious narrator of the Detective Story radio program to pulp hero in his own right. The character doesn't appear on the covers of his earliest issues. During that time, Street & Smith were running a contest offering a cool grand (it'd be like winning fifteen grand now) for the best physical description of the mystery man. Since February, Detective Story had been offering "clews," for so they were called spelled then, to help readers piece The Shadow together. This issue appears to be the last to offer a clew, but for some time afterward the weekly kept that microphone logo as part of its cover design to remind readers that Street & Smith were out to be kings of all media. With The Shadow eventually making it into movies, comic books, etc., they definitely made a good try.

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 10

This is Adventure going full blast. The April 10, 1924 issue assembles four of the magazine's mightiest writers, all with outstanding stories. Harold Lamb leads off with a massive 70+ page novel, The Making of the Morning Star, in which an English crusader encounters Lamb's Three Palladins, i.e. Genghis Khan and his Mongol companions, one of whom spends much of the story in disguise luring our hero to Tartary. You get a breather as Frank Robertson contributes a surprisingly entertaining story about sheep shearers; James K. Waterman offers what passes for a short-short in Adventure, a four-pager about blowing up whales with bombs, marred by a ship's cook's amosandandian dialect; and Bill Adams philosophizes for two pages. Then comes the third installment of Arthur O. Friel's four-parter The King of No Man's Land, an epic entertainment even on its own concerning men carving out empires in South America and running afoul of the established governments. This serial was the third outing of Friel's hero team of McKay, Knowlton and Ryan; the first, The Pathless Trail (1921) is available for download at the Internet Archive and is definitely a must-read for me. Following Friel is William Byron Mowery's grim tale of a northwest manhunt, "The Lob-Stick," a brief essay from Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur on "The Nordic Race," and a poem by Harold William Gleason. Then Georges Surdez takes over with his novelette "The White Man's Way." Surdez strays from Foreign Legion territory here but is as good as ever telling of a French colonial officer leading black troops into foreign territory to retrieve stolen rifles and falling in with an Italian officer who proves worse than he seems. Surdez is a little more racist toward Africans than he usually is toward Arabs ("Their business was killing. Thinking was the white man's.") but he's too good a writer not to invest the more important African characters with virtue and dignity, and as an adventure writer (both small a and capital A) he hasn't disappointed me yet. Our final intermission includes a sea story by a rare female contributor, Magda Leigh, a western short by Raymond S. Spears, and a poem about a returning war veteran by Leonard H. Nason who, had he appeared in prose, would have made it five titans this issue. As it is, the fourth is Arthur D. Howden-Smith, who tells another tale of Swain the Viking, who may be the most stone-cold badass hero in all pulpdom. Swain's salient characteristic is that he takes crap from absolutely no one. In "Swain's Justice" he feuds with a peer who makes the fatal mistake of bitching about his share of plunder from their last expedition. Howden-Smith writes with an archaic terseness that seems just right for Swain and his milieu, and he closes out the fiction section of this tremendous issue on a high note. After all that, there's still pulpdom's greatest letter column, "The Camp-Fire," in which Magda Leigh tells us about herself, while editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman comments on an Army scandal, rants as usual -- lest you think "gun nuts" are a more modern phenomenon -- against contemporary gun control efforts, and publishes comments on a fascinating variety of subjects. Possibly the most amazing thing about this 192 page issue is that the publishers assumed that readers would be ready for another same-sized dose just ten days later. You, however, can take your time savoring pulp at one of its peaks after downloading this issue from the link below.

ADVENTURE, April 10, 1924

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 9

The Yellow Peril is on the prowl on this 1932 Detective Story cover. It's actually a pretty good cover, all the more suggestive by hiding the victim's face and letting her legs and fingernails do the talking. Unfortunately, I can't say much about the issue apart from the cover -- and I don't know who painted that -- because none of the authors except Leslie T. White is familiar to me. The presence of an openly female writer should be noted, however. Charlotte Dockstader contributes the last of a series of stories dating back to 1928 about Spud McGee. Dockstader wrote for Detective Story for most of her career, which dated back to 1923, but around this time she was starting to diversify. She'd place stories in Detective Fiction Weekly and Ten Detective Aces the following year. Of Hector Gavin Grey, the author of the story illustrated on the cover, I know absolutely nothing -- except, now that I've looked him up, that this immigrant from Scotland killed himself in 1941, aged 41, but sealing himself inside a coffin. Apparently, writing pulps got to some people. Makes me want to read something by the guy.

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 8

Another cool H. W. Scott cover from a 1939 Street & Smith western pulp. Wild West Weekly may have been more of a "kiddie" pulp than Western Story, but for this year, at least, they shared the same bold, eye-catching cover aesthetic. I'm sure Kid Wolf was the same as he ever had been since 1929, but this sort of fresh imagery might inspire a fresh look at the familiar hero. Kid Wolf (as written, really, by Paul S. Powers) is the star this issue, but you also get C. William Harrison's Peaceful Perkins, Walker Tompkins' Firebrand, continuing a weekly series of novelettes that must have been a serial in all but name, and F. L. Stebbins' Pecos Wilson, a comic-strip character who'd been introduced two weeks before. Ralph Thurman contributes a stand-alone novelette -- meaning presumably without a series character, and Ralph Yergen throws in a short story. Whether the writers improved their game in 1939 the way the cover artists did, I can't really say.

BELLOW BILL WILLIAMS in "The Wrong Move," ARGOSY, April 7, 1934

Bellow Bill gets slipped a Mickey and wakes up in a box on a boat. He isn't meant to suffocate because someone has placed weapons in the box with him, but what he's meant to do with them, not to mention where he is, exactly, are a mystery to the tattooed pearler. We know some of what's up because Ralph R. Perry has called our attention to the chess-playing Chinese who drugged Bill in the first place. In one sense Chen Fu treats Bill as a pawn in a game we only gradually understand, but he actually sees Bill as a queen -- chess is the only context where that's possible -- with tremendous disruptive power. Soon enough, Bill learns that he isn't welcome on the ship. Soon after that, he learns that he's not the only prisoner on board. To say anymore would spoil a well-plotted tale in which Bellow Bill must depend as much on his wits as on his strength. Suffice it to say that Bill is no man's chesspiece. This is one of seven Bellow Bill stories that Perry published in 1934, a year that saw either Perry's peak of productivity -- there were only three Bellow Bills the following year -- or the character's peak of popularity. None of the 1934 stories are available in the unz.org trove, but I have four of them. You'll see the other three from my collection, at least, later this year. For now, enjoy twenty pages of prime pulp action by clicking on the link below:

Ralph R. Perry, "The Wrong Move"

ARGOSY, April 7, 1934

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 7

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

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