THE PULP CALENDAR: February 5

Nice move, Argosy. This 1938 cover lists five authors on the cover but forgets the guy who wrote the cover story. If I see animals and a man with a movie camera on an Argosy cover I say to myself, "That's Dave McNally." So I look at this cover and I ask myself, "Where's Richard Wormser?" Sure enough, Wormer has a McNally novelet, "The Singing Cats of Siam," inside. McNally must have been pretty popular, since we've seen him already this year, when our Calendar began. Not to acknowledge Wormser was either an error or a slap in the face, but it didn't stop him from submitting McNally stories, or Argosy from publishing them. In any event, Wormser needn't have felt overly slighted, since Edgar Rice Burroughs didn't make the cover, either, for the fifth chapter of his Carson of Venus serial.

I wonder how many browsers first assumed that L. G. Blochman wrote the story about the cameraman and the cats. His actual contribution was "Money for Sale," which could have been about anything. Blochman wrote a lot of stories set in Asia, but he also translated mysteries by Georges Simenon and others from French to English for American markets. The other cover-billed authors are known quantities, with Elston the least impressive to me. Richard Sale's story has one of those formulaic pulp titles from the period: "X Had a Y," in this case "Perseus Had a Helmet." Why this particular formula was so popular I can't say. Cornell Woolrich's contribution is "Wild Bill Hiccup," likely not one of the suspense master's finest or most suspenseful hours. The Wormser and the Blochman would probably make up for that.

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 4

Another stark 1939 cover from the Street & Smith western pulps. Most of the names inside aren't familiar to me this time. Cover-billed Jackson Gregory was an old-timer of nearly thirty years in the business by this point, but I don't immediately recall reading anything by him, since I prefer my western pulps from a period after Gregory died. The one contributor I do know is Peter Dawson. I also know his secret identity. Jonathan H. Glidden was the older brother (by one year) of Frederick Glidden. Fred had broken into the pulps in 1935, taking as his handle the name of a famous gunfighter, Luke Short. His quick success inspired Short to convince not only his wife but his brother John to get into the racket. As Peter Dawson, John started placing stories in 1936. Apart from Dawson, most of the contributors are veterans whose careers dated back to the 1920s, though none went as far back as Gregory. It's with the next generation of western writers, contemporaries of the Gliddens or younger, that I really get interested in the genre, but I have no reason to doubt whether any of these older writers are good. Pulp is a matter of taste, after all. Those 1939 covers have such a modernist vibe, however, that to see old-timey writers inside might be disappointing. Those who've actually read these magazines will know better, of course.

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 3

The Blue Ghost may have been intended as Detective Fiction Weekly's answer to the Green Lama, who had become the star of Munsey's monthly Double Detective magazine. Nothing much became of Myles Hudson's creation, however, or of Hudson. The Ghost debuted in a five-part serial that begins in this 1940 issue, then rematerialized in November for another serial that apparently ended Hudson's pulp career -- presuming that Hudson was something other than someone else's pen name. Too bad, really; the Ghost looks like he wields a mean life preserver. Maybe he'll get it over the dame's shoulders before she can swing that axe. I presume so, since as noted the Ghost did get another serial. Then again, if he's a Ghost already what has he to worry about?

Elsewhere this issue, Richard Sale brings back another of his series characters, Captain McGrail, who had last appeared just two weeks earlier. This was actually the third issue in a row with a Sale story, since he'd placed a Daffy Dill in between the two McGrails. The most notable series character this issue, however, is Brett Halliday's long-lived private eye Michael Shayne. Death Rides a Winner, a five-part serial concluding this week, was Shayne's first turn in pulp; he'd made his debut in novel form the year before. Later this year Shayne would make his movie debut, incarnated by Lloyd Nolan. Long after Detective Fiction Weekly was gone, Shayne would get his own magazine, a digest that lasted into the 1980s. He was one of those pop culture phenomena that, once almost omnipresent, eventually vanished, though he recently came back into print, so to speak, in e-book form. There's probably good stuff as well from Frederick C. Painton and Hugh B. Cave, while Bennett Barlay introduces a new character, the charmingly named Mortimer Death, who would appear three times more over the next year and a half. Even if you fail to be astounded by the Blue Ghost you'd likely find something of interest this issue.

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 2

The fellow making a hasty getaway is Tizzo, "the Firebrand," the Italian Renaissance swashbuckler created by George Challis. Challis was created by Frederick "Max Brand" Faust as a brand name for historical swashbucklers like the Firebrand series. Tizzo dominated Argosy in 1935 like no other character. First appearing in the November 24, 1934 issue, the turbulent redhead, whose actual favorite weapon is an axe, would get six covers the following year, beginning with this one. He starred in two serials (this one is The Great Betrayal) and four "short novels" during a blistering run that ended in August. You'll be seeing more of Tizzo on the Calendar because I own several of those issues, though not yet this one.

While Tizzo's print career was meteoric, that of Hashknife Hartley was far more enduring. Hashknife is one of W. C. Tuttle's comical western detectives, the star of a genre Tuttle pretty much had to himself. Tuttle wrote Hashknife stories for more than 30 years, starting in Adventure in 1919. As I've noted before, series characters like Hashknife belonged to their authors, for the most part, rather than any publisher. That meant that Tuttle could place a Hashknife story in Complete Western Book for Newstand Publications in October 1934, another in a December Argosy, then this one, and then another in Adventure the following month. Eventually, in 1938, Hashknife settled down at Short Stories, where new stories kept appearing until 1951. The prolific Tuttle would create a new character for Argosy later this month who would prove Hashknife's nearest rival in popularity; we'll attend to his birth in due time.

J. Allen Dunn was a big enough name that he could be billed by his last name only above the logo, like Boris Karloff was in Universal movies around the same time. "Magee of the Mounted" is, to take a wild guess, a Mountie story and a one-off. Another old-timer, William Merriam Rouse, contributes "The Shorn Lion," while F. Van Wyck Mason wraps up his Captain Long Knife serial. James Edward Grant, soon to go to Hollywood and make his name as a screenwriter, and Don Waters add short stories to round out what looks like a typical solid 1935 Argosy. Over the next few Tuesdays we'll look at some 1935 Argosies from my own collection; then I'll really know what I'm talking about.

75 YEARS AGO IN THE ARGOSY: February 1, 1941

You'd think the new Argosy was bad enough from my description of last week's issue, but I forgot to mention almost the most annoying thing about the new format. One thing Argosy had over slicks like Collier's, as far as I'm concerned at least, was that Argosy didn't jump stories. In Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post you'd read the first two or three pages of a story and then you had to jump to some page toward the back of the book. I like to read a magazine from cover to cover without jumping back and forth, so that practice -- which you see in plenty of pulps, including one story in the Dime Western I scanned last week -- really bugs me. Now, as of the transformation of January 18, Argosy was doing the same thing. The really lame thing about it is that the stories only continue for another few paragraphs, and two or three of them might jump onto the same page, making page 48 or 49 of these 50 pagers pretty ugly. Smart move, Munsey.

So now it's the third week of the big change. There's no point showing you the cover, since you pretty much saw it last week. Only the stories listed have changed, but I can show you those right here.

The February 1 issue has at least two strong stories in it, but to my dismay neither of them is Borden Chase's Farewell to the Indies. This serial is the second appearance, at least, of hero Red Flanagan. The opening pages look promising; for maybe the first time since the change there's a genuinely impressive double-page illustration.

Unfortunately, Red Flanagan is no Smooth Kyle. Instead of a wisecracking government man bantering with his badass moll, Chase gives us this Irish "dreamer" whose romantic spirit is supposed to win us over. His first appearance in the story is okay; he's commanding a Chinese warship against the Japanese, but giving all his Chinese crew Irish nicknames seems a little much. Once he's back in America, summoned to investigate the disappearance of some freighters in the Caribbean, his whimsical romantic spirit quickly becomes insufferable. We're supposed to see Flanagan as a wise mentor to the young industrialist who comes reluctantly along with the ride, but I found myself wishing the youngster would punch Red in the face.

The other serials don't help much. I remain incapable of getting interested in Richard Sale's Design for Valor, while Johnston McCulley's Zorro remains the least interesting character of his own story, The Sign of Zorro. The only thing keeping my interest there is that McCulley is interested in the other characters, and I can report in advance that things pick up considerably, and Zorro himself finally becomes interesting, in the third installment on February 8.

The good stuff this issue comes from Frederick C. Davis and Crawford Sullivan. Davis contributes a novelet, "Pennies From Chaos," about the turbulent life of a Latin American chicle plantation. It's an entertaining adventure story of the sort becoming less common in Argosy, an adventure in which the Axis is irrelevant. It's particularly noteworthy by modern standards for including an interracial romance with a happy ending, as one of the protagonists dumps his shrewish crybaby of an ultimately unfaithful wife in favor of his smart, stalwart Girl Friday Guyra, "a modernized Maya girl of twenty who wore slacks, saddle oxfords and a pert red ribbon in her hair that was like a soft cloud of jet-black smoke in which irridescent glistens wavered." The prose is purple but makes its point. Guyra is thoroughly de-stereotyped, a high school basketball star who's self-evidently the most fitting mate for a pulp hero, and it's cool to see a character like this get her man in the end after helping him defeat the local bandits with some expert marksmanship and a few well-aimed rocks.

Crawford Sullivan wrote a series of comical action stories for Argosy about the Bilge and Binnacle Club. Part of the gag was that he described the club's disreputable brawling sailors with faux elegance, as in this issue's story, "Swim Along, Little Dogies."

If you have ever spent much time in the vicinity of Fort Street, you undoubtedly know about the Bilge and Binnacle Club. A purely social organization, it was founded some years ago to promote good fellowship and brotherly love among the merchant seamen of our western coast....The club room is located in the back end of Istvan Karamoz's saloon, and all the members find it convenient to sleep there so they can always be on hand for meetings. The room contains a lot of iron cots, a genuine Wilton-type rug, and an earthenware water cooler borrowed from Fink Hall. The walls are decorated with the latest magazine covers and some artistic photos which Bottlenose Billings picked up in Port Said. Everyone who visits the club agrees that it is, indeed, pretty cozy.

It's the sort of place you might expect to find the Three Stooges if they were sailors, and those we do find there are very Stooge-like in their boisterous violence. They're pretty much cartoon characters, and for Sullivan's comical purposes that's all they need to be. The Bilge & Binnacle stories are what used to be called "rollicking," and while I kind of hate "rollicking" in movies and TV -- all too many allegedly comical western stories are guilty of rollicking -- Sullivan's tales often hit just the right anarchic note that Argosy needed in these years. In this one the Club goes west to ferry a beleaguered cattleman's herd across a newly-made salt lake, wreaking havoc along the way on rustlers and an Indian chief who isn't quite what he seems. It's unrepentant slapstick and for once I can appreciate that.

Also entertaining is the closing short story, Bertrand Shurtleff's "Sea Temper," about a blacksmith shanghaied onto a ship bound for a multi-year voyage who turns the tables on a tyrannical captain. The hero's self-liberation may be too good to be believable, but Shurtleff gets you to identify with his outrage enough that you want him to beat the captain without caring too much how he does it. So apart from the serials February 1 is an okay Argosy, if you can overlook the ugly walls of text, the ugly jump pages and the erratic illustrations. Will things improve next week? Watch this space to find out!

THE PULP CALENDAR: February 1

An unusual hard sell for a 1930 Adventure, only you might not realize from the cover that "Cry Havoc!" is one of this issue's stories, since the otherwise startling image by Colcord Heurlin neglects to identify an author. The author is billed inside only as "Redvers," but he was W. Redvers Dent, a Canadian war veteran about whom you can learn more here. The link will also hook you up with a short story Redvers published in Adventure later in 1930. The February 1 issue was Redvers's Adventure debut, but there are some more familiar names as well. Heavy hitters Talbot Mundy and L. Patrick Greene have stories this issue, while W. C. Tuttle wraps up a Hashknife Hartley comedy-western-mystery serial. Possibly the most famous name on the contents page, however, is that of Val Lewton. The famed RKO Pictures horror producer placed two non-fiction pieces in Adventure in as many years, this issue's "Kavkaz, Granddaddy of Polo" being the first. There's a lot more besides in this typically dense-packed 192 page publication. It was hard to go wrong with Adventure in this period, even if it was past its thrice-monthly peak.

Come back later today for the next installment of 75 Years Ago in the Argosy.

DIME WESTERN May 1948, COMPLETE

After posting individual stories from my copy of Dime Western for May 1948, I've finally completed my first cover-to-cover scan of a pulp magazine. Compared to many scanners out there, my resources are very limited. I use an HP C309 printer-scanner and the photo enhancement software that comes with it and Windows. After years of happily downloading incredible stuff from the Yahoo Pulpscans group, however, I decided that I had no more excuses for not doing my part to preserve the pulp heritage. Since Dime Western at this time was only 100 pages long, counting the covers, I set myself a relatively easy goal. Still, you'd be surprised at how hard it is to align a page just right, especially if your magazine is still intact, and how many botched scans had to go to the Recycle Bin. Finally, I have something complete with the cover coming up as your thumbnail the way it should. Let's review the contents once more:

You have major genre authors in Flynn and Thompson on top of the good short stories I'd downloaded earlier. The file downloadable from the link below is 100 MB. Like the story files, it's in the CBZ format, which is just a glorified .zip file in readable form. If you have Calibre's free text-conversion software you can turn this magazine into whatever file format suits you best. Enjoy this issue of Dime Western for posterity with my compliments. Click on the link below to begin:

DIME WESTERN vol. 52, no. 1, May 1948