THE PULP CALENDAR: October 14

From 1933, here's a somewhat grotesque Detective Fiction Weekly cover. Along with Francis Cockrell's cover novelette and a Judson Philips serial, this issue presents two established series characters: Sidney Herschel Small's Jimmy Wentworth and Stanley Day's Shamus Maguire, along with H. Bedford-Jones's one-week old Colin Haig, the protagonist of a six-week series of apparently interrelated short stories. Next week's entry, by the way, is "The Backward Swastika." Frank King contributes a short story while the ever-popular Convict No. 12627 contributes the purported nonfiction "Big Shots in Big Houses."

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 13

Here's a slightly startling cover from a 1934 Detective Fiction Weekly. Among the weeklies, biweeklies and twice-a-months that make up the Calendar, DFW is probably your most likely source for spooky images, apart maybe from the twice-a-month days of Dime Detective. Herman Landon has the lead novelette and Edward Parrish Ware has the last of four Ranger Jack Calhoun stories to appear this year. The other series character this issue is Laurence Donovan's Boxcar Reilly, who had a sporadic existence. After making his debut here, Reilly went dormant, according to the FictionMags Index, until Donovan revived him for Street & Smith's character-driven Crime Busters pulp in 1937. According to the Index, Donovan wrote three Boxcar stories for Crime Busters, while Norman A. Daniels contributed another. Hulbert Footner of Mme. Storey fame continues his serial The Four-Toed Track, while David Crewe and Stephen Terry contribute short stories. David Crewe is listed as a house pseudonym for Popular Publications, but that doesn't account for the four stories under that name that appeared in Munsey's DFW in 1934-5. There's also a good-sized nonfiction piece by Tom Roan and the first in an occasional series of "Jujutsu" lessons from one John Yamado. Really, though -- how can you turn that face down???

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 12

Here's a vaguely sinister 1935 cover for Detective Fiction Weekly, advertising the return (and final bow) of Herman Landon's antihero Martin Dale, aka the Picaroon. The character had appeared thirty times in Street & Smith's Detective Story between 1921 and 1932. Landon had made his DFW debut back in January 1932 and had been dividing his time between the Munsey mag, Detective Story and Street & Smith's Complete Stories since then. While this issue may have marked the end of the Picaroon, Landon continued placing stories in DFW until 1938 and ended his pulp career in various Popular Publications detective mags. Regular DFW readers were probably more excited about the latest "Lady From Hell" story by Eugene Thomas, in which Vivian Legrand encounters, or is, "the London Queen of Crime." They also got a novelette by future Academy Award winner Charles G. Booth, a Ranger Jack Calhoun story by Edward Parrish Ware -- who'd been cranking them out since 1926, short stories by John H. Knox, Earl W. Scott and one Captain Havelock-Bailie, and a serial chapter from Max Brand. The "They're Swindling You!" headline heralds the debut of a nonfiction column by Frank Wrentmore that would run regularly in DFW until 1940. So you get an end and a beginning this issue, but that was probably pretty common in the weekly pulps.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 11

This symbolic absence represents the 1941 demise of Argosy as a weekly magazine. The last Argosy Weekly has an October 4, 1941 cover date. In better times you could have expected an October 11 issue, but the next issue was dated November 1 beginning a biweekly schedule that would last only a few months before Argosy went monthly in the spring of 1942. I don't know the boardroom details in the case, but it seems that the Munsey corporation made some catastrophic decisions, starting arguably with the misadventure of the monthly All-American Fiction in 1937-8. There followed a quixotic attempt to expand the "Red Star" line, with old reliables Argosy and Detective Fiction Weekly shrinking as more doomed magazines appeared. How much creative errors like replacing cover paintings with a standard cover format, with only the text changing, had to do with the decline is unclear, though they couldn't have helped.  There may have been less demand for weekly pulps by this time, but Street & Smith were able to keep some going all the way through 1942. Say what you will about trends, but it's impossible to eliminate human error as a factor in this humbling of a once-mighty pulp magazine. In time, of course, and with the help of a different publisher, Argosy found a format that allowed it to outlive almost all its erstwhile competition in the pulp field, but fans in 1941 might not have believed such an outcome possible.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 10

This day in 1921 was the cover date for Adventure's conversion to a thrice-monthly pulp and the beginning of its peak period. One year later, this 1922 issue has quite a formidable lineup, at least as far as I'm concerned, and a cover that's at least in the ballpark for marking the modern Columbus Day holiday. It features five of my favorite pulp writers: Talbot Mundy with a complete Jimgrim story; Georges Surdez with "The Yellow Streak;" Leonard H. Nason with "A Can of Jam," his second pulp story; J. D. Newsom with "Bad Luck," his third; and sea-story specialist Albert Richard Wetjen with "The Courtship of Captain Driscoll, " his fourth. If that's not enough, Hugh Pendexter's in the middle of a serial and you get stories by Albert E. Apple, Max Bonter, Eugene Cunningham, Frank H. Houston and animal specialist F. St. Mars. If the cover doesn't make you seasick it looks like great reading inside.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 9

Nothing dated October 9 really impressed me visually, so I've chosen this 1937 Argosy as a matter of virtual vanity, as it portrays my pulp identity of Samuel Wilson, the symbol of our nation. Presumably Sam is throwing out the first ball of a World Series game, which would be further proof that baseball was a faster sport back them. They only played 154 games and the Series itself was the only playoff. Note that Sam is throwing the first ball, not the first pitch. This had become a presidential tradition earlier in the century, but it was still beneath a chief executive's dignity to actually take the field for the ceremony. Anyway, while the FictionMags Index has no table of contents for this issue, it was scanned and uploaded some years ago, and that enables me to give you some idea of what Sam was selling this week.

Two of the serials are really good. They're Borden Chase's Smooth Kyle story Blue-White and Perfect, which was later made into a Michael Shayne movie, and Eustace L. Adams' Stunt Man, in which the title character is obliged to impersonate the actor he doubles for in movies when the star gets into a jam. It's odd that Argosy went with a generic Uncle Sam cover when this issue started a Sheriff Henry serial by W. C. Tuttle, but perhaps a cover artist missed a deadline. The lead novelette is L. G. Blochman's "The Imperfect Gentleman," set in Europe rather than the author's more usual haunts. An American gangster on the lam wants to live like a gentleman in Paris but encounters the notorious "apaches," the hoodlum types immortalized by that violent pas-de-deux dance you see in so many comedy shorts and cartoons from these years. Perhaps you can hear the music in your head as I mention it. The rest of the issue, I regret to say, has faded from my memory after about three years. It either says something about the stories or it says something about me.

THE PULP CALENDAR: October 8

I imagine lumberjacks would make a tough crowd for any fighter, a crowd of pulp lumberjacks especially, given how they fight each other all the time. While this 1932 cover promotes Frank Richardson Pierce's novelette "Timber Bred," it also serves as a prophecy of what was coming for a new Argosy author. Frank Mercer Morgan had an abrupt pulp career. He's credited with a text story in a 1923 issue of Ace-High Magazine, and doesn't reappear until 1932. He published a story in West and a non-fiction piece in Blue Book before Argosy accepted his two-parter Golden Doom and prepared a "Men Who Make the Argosy" column for the new talent. After Golden Doom Mercer followed up immediately with the short story "Flame of the East." A month later he was finished as a pulp writer. Argosy had learned that Mercer was a blatant plagiarist. Golden Doom had been lifted from H. Bedford-Jones' 1924 novelette "Madagascar Gold" from Blue Book, while "Flame of the East" was taken from James Francis Dwyer's 1912 "Golden Woman of Kelantan," published in Red Book and reprinted in the Sunday supplement American Weekly. Perhaps Mercer thought that so much had been published in pulp that no one would notice if he reused some. If so, he underestimated the fan or collector mentality -- or else Bedford-Jones and/or Dwyer saw and remembered. One can only hope that the rest of this issue's contents -- serials by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Carse and J. E. Grinstead, a Fred MacIsaac novelette, a short story by C. S. Montanye -- were as original as pulp could be by this point.