THE PULP CALENDAR: October 7

W. H. Hinton paints a thematically appropriate cover for this 1939 Western Story and its lead novella, Ney N. Geer's "Sidewinder Syndicate." I've had my doubts about "Ney N. Geer" but it proves to be the author's real name. Geer (1895-1974) had a relatively brief pulp career after starting late. He didn't publish his first pulp story -- or the first one the FictionMags Index is aware of -- until he was 41 years old. All his stories but one appeared in Street & Smith pulps. Geer's biggest success was his Potluck Jones series, as his being mentioned by name on this cover will attest. "Sidewinder Syndicate" is the exact halfway mark of Potluck's career, the seventh of his thirteen stories. He and Geer are joined here by old hand W. C. Tuttle, W. Ryerson Johnson, Wilfred McCormick and Cliff Walters, while Jay Lucas continues his serial Range of Hunted Men. The cover may well be the strongest thing in this issue, and it's a fine example of the Street & Smith aesthetic circa 1939.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 6

Borden Chase broke into the pulps in the March 1934 issue of Real Detective. He made it into Argosy with the novelette "Tunnel Men" that June. He then appeared in three consecutive issues of Adventure. By October he'd had a double success with East River. I'm actually not sure which came first: the serial Chase co-wrote with Edward J. Doherty -- a regular writer of nonfiction for the slick weekly Liberty --or the screenplay Fox would release the following February as Under Pressure, under Raoul Walsh's direction. I'm more certain that it was the film then in production more than Chase's good name that earned East River this cover. Chase had already established himself and his almost private subgenre of "sandhog" stories about the mighty men who dug tunnels under rivers or through mountains. The first installment seems to set up a romantic quadrangle of two brawling buddies -- Victor McLaglen would play "Jumbo," his longtime action/comedy partner Edmund Lowe "Shocker" -- and two women, one of whom loves Shocker but feels she owes an emotional debt to Jumbo, the other falling hard for Shocker but jealously recognizing the first's feelings for him. So much for the heart interest. For the male readers Chase and Doherty offer suspenseful action emphasizing how the sandhogs are always on the brink of disaster. In short, a decent opening installment. Given Walsh's rep as a canonical director, I'd really like to see Under Pressure now. Curiously, for all that Chase is best known now as a screenwriter of westerns, it doesn't look like wrote any westerns in his pulp career.

I'll have something to say about Ralph R. Perry's Bellow Bill Williams novelette "Blood Payment" when I scan and upload it this weekend. Apart from that, we continue with A. Merritt's final serial Creep, Shadow! and J. E. Grinstead's tale of alienated youth out west, The Kid From Hell, and we get a good-sized novelette from Fred MacIsaac  that I haven't read yet.  There's a baseball story by James W. Egan and Hapsburg Liebe's "The Black Schooner" about a public enemy, a Secret Service man and a band of hoboes.  In "Argonotes" there's a fascinating little letter from A. Carras of the Bronx who, inspired by the recent innovation of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, proposes a team of Argosy all-stars -- characters, that is, not authors. Interestingly, Carras fields a co-ed lineup, designating Hulbert Footner's detective Madame Storey as his starting pitcher. Here's the rest of his lineup.

1B - Peter the Brazen ("Loring Brent"/George F. Worts)
2B - the Roadrunner (aka El Paisano, Erle Stanley Gardner)
SS - Major Brane (Gardner)
3B - Bob Zane (Whispering Sands series, Gardner)
C - Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs -- most recently playing for Liberty, slick league)
LF -Carson Napier (Venus series, Burroughs)
RF - Bellow Bill Williams (Ralph R. Perry FTW)
CF - Singapore Sammy (Worts)
P - Mme. Rosika Storey (Hulbert Footner)

In a cute touch, Carras makes John H. Thompson's vagrants Bill and Jim the team's waterboys, and in what looks like a major dis to me he assigns W. Wirt's Jimmie Cordie "and his gang" as batboys. The real shocker here may be that Carras leaves frickin' Zorro on the bench. Apart from that, some readers may have preferred that Carras give the ball to Worts' Gillian Hazeltine, but for all I know Mme. Storey could take the defense attorney in a fight, or at least out-throw him. In any event, this list gives new meaning to the term fantasy sports, and on that note I leave you with this issue's sponsor:

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 5

Street & Smith made an interesting decision to give one 1940 Western Story cover to a nonfiction piece. 1940 was the 400th anniversary of Coronado's exploration of the future American west, and while many events commemorated his historic trek, there's no special significance that I know of to October 5 or the entire month in that narrative. Maybe the editor had been waiting for R. Edgar Moore to deliver his ten-page piece on the subject. Moore is credited with only nine stories in the FictionMags Index, and his Coronado piece is the last of them. The real pulp fan probably would have been more excited to have a Luke Short serial, Gunsmoke Graze, begin in this issue. Short is joined by a bunch of familiar faces: Harry F. Olmsted, Harry Sinclar Drago, Seth "Frank Richardson Pierce" Ranger, Bennett Foster, George Cory Franklin and pulp poet S. Omar Barker. A conquistador may have been an unusual sight up front, but otherwise Western Story regulars could be pretty sure of what they were getting.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 4

How about a little voodoo? This 1930 Detective Story cover promises us a "Severed Head" but gives us a severed leg on that poor little doll. It has something to do, perhaps, with George Allan England's hero T. Ashley, who'd been around since 1918 but would really get down to business over the next few years. England may have been top-billed this issue but some people probably bought it to continue Edgar Wallace's serial The Clew of the Silver Key, complete with archaic spelling. In 1933 Street & Smith would take over Clues Detective Stories from Clayton but stuck with the modern spelling. Most of this week's authors are the usual Street & Smith veterans, though Leslie T. White makes his Detective Story debut at the precocious age of 27, after breaking into pulp at the start of the year.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 3

This is probably the most expensive 1936 Argosy any collector will buy, if not one of the most expensive issues of the entire 1930s. That's because it features the three most collectible names Argosy published in those years. None of them is Theodore Roscoe, even though he has the actual cover story this time. However, L. Ron Hubbard is one, with his novelette "Mr. Luck." Edgar Rice Burroughs, mentioned curtly on top, is another, continuing his latest Tarzan serial. The third, who never had his name on an Argosy cover, is Robert E. Howard, who died on June 11 of this year. Friendly editor Jack Byrne, who had published Howard's boxing fiction in Fiction House's Fight Stories, wanted to promote Howard as a writer of comic westerns, but didn't start publishing the adventures of Pike Bearfield, the character Howard created for him, until this issue. Three Bearfield stories would appear during October, once every two weeks. I haven't seen any contemporary Argonotes to tell how Argosy readers responded to Bearfield, but some writers suggest that had Howard lived he might have had a very different identity as a writer and might be remembered today as a western humorist first and a sword-and-sorcery pioneer only later. I don't know. I haven't read the Bearfield stories but I've tried some about his precursor, Breckinridge Elkins, which Byrne published in Action Stories, and wasn't impressed. Admittedly,  I only read a couple of early stories, but I didn't find their "Haw haw, I guess I don't know my own strength" tone that funny. I prefer the El Borak stories that were appearing elsewhere at the same time, not to mention Red Nails, the Conan serial that had wrapped up in Weird Tales the previous month. But as faithful readers may have noticed already, I don't read pulps for laughs, unless they prove unintentional.

Not that they add to the resale value, but L. G. Blochman and H. Bedford-Jones have serials running this issue, while Anthony M. Rud and James Stevens contribute short stories. Speaking of big-name writers once more, however, French author Andre Malraux, some of whose subject matter would not be alien to pulp fiction, is this week's Man of Daring, as delineated by artist Stookie Allen. Quite a lineup, overall.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 2

Here's a just mildly spooky Detective Fiction Weekly cover from 1937, promoting Richard Sale's novelette, "Give, Ghost, Give!" Overall the issue has a decent-sounding lineup, with a novelette by Cleve F. Adams, stories by Wyatt Blassingame, Whitman Chambers, Bert Collier Norbert Davis and Eric Howard, plus a serial installment from Fred MacIsaac. Don't expect a lot of really scary stuff from the weeklies and twice-a-month mags in October, but I'll see what I can come up with just the same.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 1

The so-called "shudder pulps" were still new in 1933, but while this Dime Detective cover looks like part of the trend, and the Oscar Schisgall story "They Die in Flame" may also be, the real headline story, to judge from type size, is a real throwback. Craig Kennedy, Arthur B. Reeve's "scientific detective," had been solving crimes since 1910. Reeve, an early serial screenwriter, was near the end of the line here, and there's some speculation that he didn't actually write the Kennedy stories from this period. This was Kennedy's only appearance in Dime Detective. As the magazine favored long stories, there are only two more stories in this issue besides the Reeve and the Schisgall: John Lawrence's "The Corpse Was Cold" and Leslie T. White's "Stairway of Shadows." The cover by William Reusswig is reason enough to inaugurate the month of October with this magazine.