Pulp Reading: Donald Barr Chidsey, "GRAVEYARD OF THE GODS," ARGOSY, April 17, 1937

Donald Barr Chidsey (1902-71) merited a New York Times obituary for his nonfiction writing, with a passing mention of his novel writing. His voluminous pulp output, perhaps predictably, went unmentioned. Chidsey broke into pulps at the same time he was publishing irreverent historical biographies like Sir Humphrey Gilbert: Elizabeth's Racketeer (which can be found on the Internet Archive). He published his first pulp story in Street & Smith's Detective Story in July 1931, then turned up in Adventure at the end of that year. He picked up the pace in 1932, creating his long-running hero Nick Fisher for Detective Fiction Weekly and making his Argosy debut that summer. Chidsey soon was publishing all over the place, including the two most prestigious detective magazines, Black Mask and Dime Detective. For the latter he created the team of Morton & McGarvey, which he moved to DFW after an apparent falling out with Popular Publications that saw him stop publishing in Adventure after 1936. By 1937 he published primarily in the Munsey pulps (DFW and Argosy) with occasional forays into the slicks. Despite some early historical stories that presumably would be in keeping with his non-fiction interests, Chidsey became primarily a detective and crime writer, specializing in exotic locations, particularly for the Nick Fisher and Eddie Savoy team. He diversified in the war years, returning to Adventure and publishing more in Blue Book. He stuck around pulp almost to the bitter end, publishing his last pulp fictions in Popular's Fifteen Detective Tales in 1954. "Graveyard of the Gods" is a typical Chidsey product of the mid-thirties, though it doesn't have a detective as a central character. Point of view shifts from the Hawaiian native who drunkenly divulges a secret to the kidnappers who exploit it to the detective who tracks them and inadvertently tips off the native, a sacred guardian who must enforce a powerful tabu. It's a briskly paced story enlivened (or burdened) with pulp exotica and if you dig that sort of thing, or if it doesn't bother you -- and you wouldn't be a pulp fan if it did -- you should enjoy this story from the golden age of Argosy. My scan comes with the wild V.E. Pyles cover that I use for wallpaper, the early ad pages and this issue's table of contents. You can download it from the link below:

Donald Barr Chidsey, "GRAVEYARD OF THE GODS,"

ARGOSY, April 17, 1937

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 17

This cover should look familiar to you. The April 17, 1937 Argosy was one of the first issues of the magazine I acquired for myself, in large part because of that wild V.E. Pyles cover. At this early point in my collecting, after reading my way through the Argosy collection at unz.org, Donald Barr Chidsey was one of the authors I knew I liked; another early purchase got me his three-part 1938 serial Midas of the Mountains. "Graveyard of the Gods" almost lives up to that image. Some gangsters in Hawaii learn from a drunken native that a certain small island is taboo, the native alone visiting it to perform sacred services, and figure its isolation will make it an ideal spot to stash a kidnap victim. They fail to anticipate that the normally amiable native might get suspicious, much less wise to their sacrilegious scheme, though they might have been in the clear if not for a detective asking questions. It's a solid, punchy story that you'll be able to see soon. For now, let's see what else this issue has to offer:

Frank Richardson Pierce's "The Limit" is uplifting without getting too mawkish; a lumberman and hunter who loses a leg in an accident is demoralized, convinced that he'll never hunt again, until friends hook him up with a three-legged pointer to inspire him. Joel Townsley Rogers' "Locusts From Asia," as this week's Argonotes explain, was written back in 1928 but subsequently lost by the author for eight years or so. It's an odd, purple-prosed affair about British and German planes alike being attacked at the height of World War I by a mysterious fleet of advanced planes piloted by barely-human easterners and commanded by a feral-seeming topless woman. This week's first of two installments is padded by a protracted encounter between a German ace and his mentor, a Jewish scientist, in which the ace demands superweapons to fight the British with. After he stalks off, the scientist is captured by the mystery fleet. I found "Locusts" severely overwritten, but I found the premise just outrageous enough to keep me interested -- which makes it a good thing that I have next week's issue, too.

Next week will also give me another installment of Eustace L. Adams' Revolution -- With Pictures, another of his kickass serials from a period where he seemed to bat them out effortlessly. In this one, a newsreel team gets embroiled in a Latin American civil war. I don't have the first installment but an Argosy recap will usually get you up to speed easily enough, and Adams writes well enough to make even a fragment entertaining. I found the same to be true for this week's installment of Garnett Radcliffe's Doomed Liner, which is more of a mystery thiller than the sort of disaster story the title suggests. Some maniacal jiu-jitsu expert is on a murder spree -- his finishing move is the "bum's rush" --  and may be part of some bigger conspiracy. This installment takes place mostly on land and is primarily detective work, though the Scotland Yard hero has a hairsbreadth escape from a flood of water and rats at the climax. I haven't read much by Racliffe but he impressed me this time. I'm still working my way through the conclusion of Richard Wormser's Carnival Queen but I read the original installment and liked it some time ago and I'm pretty confident in Wormser as a rule.

Richard Sale's "Spin Down, Spin In" is an ultimately predictable tale of a widow who blames a flier with a bad reputation for her bereavement and learns flying in order to seduce him into a murder-suicide-by-crash scenario. It's predictable in its happy ending, but I suppose that if the widow followed through it would only be a gruesome anecdote. That leaves "The Madness of Captain Jonas" by Albert Richard Wetjen. During my exploration of the unz.org trove Wetjen became one of my favorite writers for Collier's, a slick that ran a lot of pulpy stories. His Wallaby Jim stories (eventually adapted for film) seem awfully violent for a family magazine, but he did a lot of more conventional sea stories as well. Wetjen didn't publish in Argosy very often -- his main pulp hangout was Fiction House's Action Stories -- so I wonder whether his Argosy stories are Collier's rejects with not enough action for Action Stories. There's not much action in "Captain Jonas," which is almost a Twilight Zone type story, the captain's madness being a superstitious nature that infuriates the new mate who narrates the story, and the twist being that a navigation decision attributed to supernatural influence, but resulting from a mundane accident, allows the crew to survive a fog without running aground. The short story is an entertaining compendium of absurdities effectively told with enduring dismay, and while it lacks the blood and thunder of Wetjen in full pulp mode it fits in Argosy just fine.

As of now I've scanned the Chidsey story and will make it available for download later today, and now that I have that head start I've a mind to do a cover-to-cover scan of a pretty decent Argosy from one of the venerable weekly's last good years. At my rate of work I hope to present the complete issue for download before the end of the month. I think you'll like it. And lest we forget, this issue was sponsored by:

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 16

This 1932 issue of Western Story is truly a Faustian bargain. It gives you three Fausts for the price of one. Max Brand, of course was really Frederick Faust. George Owen Baxter was also Frederick Faust. On top of that, David Manning was Frederick Faust. So if you're keeping score, all three authors listed on the cover were the same person. Faust is responsible for 100 of this issue's 144 pages. The "others" are Frank Richardson Pierce (I'm surprised he didn't bring Seth Ranger along to even things up a little), George Corey Franklin and Dex Volney. That last is another pseudonym, covering for one Volney G. Mathison. Placing three stories in one issue (two of them are serial installments) wasn't unusual for Faust; he'd done it the April 2 Western Story as well. I've seen H. Bedford-Jones do the same stunt in issues of Blue Book, using his Gordon Keyne and Michael Gallister aliases -- but Blue Book was a monthly, and I'm not aware of HBJ pulling similar stunts in Argosy or Short Stories. Feats like this Western Story hat trick bolster the case for Faust, rather than HBJ, as King of the Pulps.

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 15

Launched as a monthly in November 1931, Popular Publications' Dime Detective graduated to twice-a-month in March 1933 and kept that schedule until the summer of 1935. It's regarded as the number-two detective pulp, critically speaking, after the legendary Black Mask. By this point in 1935 Dime Detective was aping Popular's trendy shudder pulps with cover scenes of torturous peril like this image by ace artist Walter Baumhofer. This Yellow Peril cover -- and leaving the ethnicity out of it, I suppose many taxpayers today feel like that poor woman under the cauldron -- illustrates a story by T. T. Flynn, a detective pulp stalwart before he turned into a western specialist in the 1940s. The real highlight of the issue for a pulp fan probably is (or ought to be) the Cardigan story by Frederick Nebel noted modestly in the lower left-hand corner. Nebel is probably the best pulp detective writer yet to be canonized by the wider culture. Whether his heroes are cops or private eyes (Cardigan being the latter), Nebel infuses them with a fury unmatched by any of his peers. He may be the most hard-boiled of hard-boiled writers because no one takes crap from anyone in his world. Cardigan, apparently modeled on the actor George Bancroft, rages equally at crooks and cops when they get in his way or treat others unfairly, but his sensitive side comes through in his dealings with his versatile and nearly equally hard-boiled assistant Pat Seaward. "Hell Couldn't Stop Him" strikes me as a plausible title for a Cardigan story. Altus Press has reprinted all the Cardigan stories in four volumes of print or e-books; they are definitely worth your while, and a Cardigan story alone probably makes a Dime Detective worth your time -- though I must warn you that you'll pay much, much more than a dime for one of these today.

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 14

I don't own this 1934 Argosy, but you'll recall that I do own the previous week's issue. So I can say a little bit more about some of April 14's contents by referring to April 7's "Looking Ahead!" page. For instance, what's the deal with the giant pirate with the loud jacket on the cover? "Fred MacIsaac presents an unusual serial -- a queerly assorted group of passengers aboard a sailing vessel bound around the world. When mutiny threatens, they are quite literally between The Devil and the Deep." As for the pirate and his jacket, we must write those off as artistic license.

This issue has two novelettes. In Anthony M. Rud's "White Fires," "A jungle-trained white youth with strange powers falls into a crooks' haven in South America." In Weed Dickinson's "Crime in the Clouds," "It started as a press-agent's scheme and ended as the aviation crime of the year." Whatever it is, you'll have to read the April 14 number to find out.

The rest I have to figure out for myself. Karl W. Detzer's serial The Fatal Alarm got off to a good start last week so I trust it will stay good. Max Brand continues his western serial Brother of the Cheyennes, and people seem to have liked his work in that genre. That leaves Edward C. Acheson's "Alibi," apparently his pulp debut and his only appearance in Argosy. He turns out to have been the brother of Dean Acheson, the onetime U.S. Secretary of State, as well as a crime reporter for the Hartford Courant and, in later life, an OSS agent and professor of economics. By comparison, H. M. Sutherland, author of "Poker," was just a guy. He wrote a lot more than Acheson, and probably had to.

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 13

A very unusual cover design by C. Calvert for this 1935 Detective Fiction Weekly cover. I imagine it was quite daring not to show the protagonist's entire face. Prospective readers may have felt the way early moviegoers were expected to feel when early moviemakers experimented with close-ups: where's the rest of him? In case the cover isn't clear about this, Anthony Hamilton is Max Brand's Spy, the protagonist of a series of novelettes Brand started at the start of 1935. "Treason Against a King" is the fifth Spy story and the first since February. Brand would bat out three more before the end of May, take a breather, and wrap the series with a serial in December. Frederick Faust burned through characters like that; Tizzo the Firebrand (written by "George Challis") became immensely popular, to judge by how many Argosy covers he got in 1934-5, but Faust was through with him in less than a year. By comparison, Frank L. Packard's Jimmie Dale (aka the Gray Seal), whose latest serial continues in this issue, had been around since 1914, though "The Missing Hour," his last adventure, was only his second since 1922. The other series character in this number is H. H. Matteson's Hoh-Hoh Stevens, the star of "The Critter of Hell Bent Bay." Two nearly-omnipresent writers, Frank Richardson Pierce and Richard Howells Watkins, put in appearances, as do Robert H. Leitfred and old-timer Eugene P. Lyle. Every issue of DFW came with a number of non-fiction features, including "Illustrated Crimes." This week's is "The Elusive Sheik Slayer of Hoboken, New Jersey," which might well prove that truth is stranger even than pulp fiction.

THE PULP CALENDAR: April 12

I have nothing special to say about the contents and authors of this 1941 Wild West Weekly. There are some familiar names (Walker Tompkins, Lee Bond, Chuck Martin) and apparently only one series character story (the final appearance of Sleepy Sloane by John B. Strong aka J. Allen Dunn). I just want to point out just how ugly this cover is, two years after Street & Smith covers were things of beauty on nearly a weekly basis. It'd be a shame if someone at the company thought that a cover like this would sell the magazine better than the often-brilliant 1939 cover designs. I'm not sure what's worse about this cover: the inert looking copy at the bottom or that hideous floating price box, which seems to have been placed where white space permits. And is that a recycled cover painting, perhaps? The overall slapped-together impression this cover creates makes me think so. Pulp covers are often admired today as works of art, but this one proves that not all of them were.