Pulp Reading: ARGOSY, April 24, 1937, COMPLETE

My Labor Day weekend project was to finish an Argosy scan I started months ago, only to get distracted by other finds and projects. I scanned and uploaded the April 17 issue earlier this year, and I have the May 1 issue for future scanning. This new upload will allow collectors to read the complete two-parter by Joel Townsley Rogers, Locusts From Asia, in which a yellow-peril flying circus intervenes in the skies over the western front during World War I. It also includes what I believe to be the first appearance of Frank Richardson Pierce's popular sourdough raconteur, No-Shirt McGee. Needless to say, there are plenty of other goodies for pulp fans. My long-term goal is to have Eustace L. Adams' Revolution With Pictures complete, which will require me to get the April 10 issue. The final installment is in the May 8 issue, which is available at unz.org. For now, I hope you enjoy these 144 pages from a year when Argosy was still going strong. Download the .cbz file from the link below.

ARGOSY WEEKLY, April 24, 1937

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 5

Simpler is better most of the time with pulp covers. Street & Smith seems to have gone through cycles of cover design. Like 1939, 1931 was a period of relatively minimal cover copy, with paintings that might well tell their own stories independently of any story inside. This is a nice example from 1931. Robert J. Horton is the star author, but also inside are Max Brand, continuing his serial Golden Lightning, and Jackson Gregory, wrapping up The Silver Star. An editor might have been tempted to throw "bronze" into one of the other stories, but if so the temptation was resisted. Hugh F. Grinstead, Joseph F. Hook, Ray Humphreys and Howard J. Perry are the other fiction contributors. And it looks like that cowboy has a winning hand one way or the other.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 4

I was busy finishing a scan today (that I'll share with you tomorrow) so here's a perfunctory Calendar entry from 1937. The cover story, "Lonely Inn," was the first of three posthumous Bulldog Drummond stories Detective Fiction Weekly would publish over the remainder of the year. H. C. "Sapper" McNiele had died less than a month earlier, on August 14. Bulldog Drummond would carry on in print (thanks to an authorized successor to Sapper) and on film for years to come. Oddly, the remaining Sapper stories got no hype on the covers of the issues they appeared in. This issue also has novelettes by John K. Butler, Viola Brothers Shore and Roger Torrey, short stories by Wyatt Blassingame, Dale Clark and Cyril Plunkett, and the conclusion of William Edward Hayes' serial Kill the Umpire! These weren't DFW's biggest stars, but they were familiar names to regular readers of the time.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 3

You're looking at Dan Harden, a two-fisted insurance claims investigator for the International Surety Company whose work takes him around the world. His first appearance that I know of is "Coronation Interlude," a novelette in the October 23, 1937 Argosy. By July 9, 1938's "Pharaoh Had a Tomb," he merits an Argosy cover. His last appearance that I know of is in February 1941. This cover for "The Road to Damascus" promises exotic adventure, but the Middle East setting amounts to little more than local color. Harden is sent to Jerusalem to investigate a kidnapping that proves to have been a dognapping, and gradually uncovers an English widow's plot to shut her stepdaughter out of an inheritance with the help of the bubonic plague. The local color takes the form of a supporting cast headed by "Hussein the Magnificent," a local fixer who pumps the other locals for information while pumping Harden for the last few pounds he needs for passage to Paris, where he plans to become a rug merchant. A typical pulp hero, Harden himself is blood-brother to a prominent sheik, a relationship he can play like a trump card in a sticky situation on the title road. Painton does a decent job shifting the tone of his story from broad humor -- Harden and his wife are eager to leave home in Paris for anywhere when her obnoxious relatives turn up -- to outright horror when Harden discovers the poor stepdaughter in a plague-ridden, rat-infested archaeological dig. Pretty good overall.

"Road to Damascus" is the only story I've read from this issue, though the main reason I have the magazine is the concluding installment of Donald Barr Chidsey's serial Midas of the Mountains.This is typical of me. I buy one thing, and then I buy another and the last thing ends up closer to the bottom of the to-read pile. The Pulp Calendar has actually been useful in getting me to read some early purchases that I've neglected. I also look forward to Arden X. Pangborn's "A Cell For Wong Soo," because Chinatown stories fascinate me. Pangborn's series about Wong Soo and his father Wong Sun began earlier in 1938 and continued into early 1940. Old-timer James Francis Dwyer has a short story, "The Devil's Mushroom," which is unusual for Argosy in this period for having an extra illustration besides the usual title-page piece. There are also stories by Howard Marsh and Robert Neal Leath, while Bennett Foster continues the western serial Cut Loose Your Wolf and Frances Shelley Wees continues her mystery Lost House. Argosy's decline has already begun -- its page count fell from 144 to 128 earlier in 1938 -- but the content doesn't really show it that much yet.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 2

For variety's sake, here's a West from 1931, when the Doubleday, Doran pulp was a biweekly. That meant readers would get three issues that September compared to only two of West's stablemate, the twice-a-month Short Stories. I haven't much to say about the contributors except that some were familiar names to genre fans of the time; [William] Colt MacDonald, Allan K. Echols, Frank C. Robertson and Charles W. Tyler, for instance, though there's also a one-time-only author here named Hunter Eaton. In all such instances, however, you might guess that Eaton really was one of the aforementioned writers getting a second story into the issue. I picked this one mainly because I thought the blue-green sky of William Reusswig's cover contrasted nicely with West's sunbeam banner. By the way, this issue is the first appearance of the cover hero, George C. Shedd's Ben Pickering, in the FictionMags Index, but I'd guess he wouldn't be called by name on the cover if he hadn't appeared before.

THE PULP CALENDAR: September 1

With this 1934 issue Popular Publications' Dime Western, which started life as a monthly in December 1932, made the jump to twice-a-month status. Like most pulps on that schedule, it carried the 1st and the 15th of the month as cover dates until reverting to monthly in December 1935. Over that time thirty issues of Dime Western were published. Walt Coburn, this issue's featured author, appeared in 27 of them. That's impressive, but if Harry F. Olmsted wrote all the Tensleep Maxon stories attributed to "Bart Cassidy," then he appeared, under one handle or the other, in every single issue. Ray Nafziger was nearly as prolific as these two, while Cliff Farrell only began to pick up the pace, at least as Dime Western was concerned, in 1935. This is pretty much an all-star lineup except for short story contributor Stewart Van der Veer, an occasional alias for one Lurton Blassingame.  If any of the big names dropped out for a couple of weeks, T. T. Flynn and others were on hand to take up the slack. I haven't read Dimes from this far back, but based on what I've read from the Forties the quality level was consistently high here.

THE PULP CALENDAR: August 31

Now that he had retired his alter ego Loring Brent and Brent's great creation Peter the Brazen, George F. Worts had more time  The Gold Fist, premiering in this 1935 issue, was a rare Worts story that had nothing to do with either Singapore Sammy or defense attorney Gillian Hazeltine. It starts with a corny melodramatic premise that actually might have made a screwball comedy. Bill Lassiter, a playboy heir to a $13,000,000 fortune, makes a bet with his father's secretary, who's inherited a couple of million herself, that he can earn $50,000 in a year solely with his brains or hands. If he can't, the secretary gets all his millions. After establishing the premise, Worts fast-forwards to the twelfth month, which finds Lassiter hard up in Peru after getting conned out of a commission that would have won him the bet. He then just happens to see a Chinese woman murdered by a man without a nose. The murderer was after a package, and when the victim drops the package Bill sees what looks like a sculpted gold fist. He subsequently learns that this is no mere gold fist but the Gold Fist, a much-coveted Inca artifact that may convey long-forgotten engineering secrets of the great empire. Assured that he can get at least $100,000 for this treasure, Bill tracks down the noseless man and steals the Gold Fist. After sending him over the side of a steamer (see cover), Bill determines that the sculpture is "the fist of a wise man, clenched not in rage to strike but in determination to hold a secret." Lassiter now has to find a purchaser in New York to just make his deadline and win his bet. His quest is complicated by the lurking threat of a  Bolivian conspirator, as well as his relationship with Joanna, an American woman he met and helped in Peru, whom he learns was held prisoner as an insane person on the steamer he sailed home on, only to be set free abruptly in New York.  And just for the hell of it, back in New York his scientist cousin Homer has developed the ability to see when people are about to die. Parts One through Three of Four of this serial are available in three consecutive issues of Argosy at unz.org. Whether you'll really want to see the conclusion is another story.

In other serial action, Max Brand continues The Sacred Valley, Borden Chase concludes Bed Rock (it's about sandhogs, not cavemen), and Frank Richardson Pierce resumes the three-part Silver Thaw. This entertaining tale of a father-son logging feud inspired a spin-off series about a supporting character, the belligerent CCC worker Donnybrook McDuff. This consisted of at least one novelet and one serial, Donnybrook Shoots the Works, in 1936. The main standalone story this issue is a Hulbert Footner novelette featuring one of pulp's great female sleuths, Mme. Rosika Storey. In "The Richest Widow" the detective and her assistant Bella must figure out who made the title character and her new husband, an English actor, go out the porthole of the widow's ocean-liner stateroom. There are a lot of suspects, to be sure, since the widow was going to rewrite her will. Whodunit? Find out for yourself here. Shorts by Theodore Fredenburgh and Franklin H. Martin round out another solid -- if also goofy, in Worts' case -- 1935 Argosy.