Sunday, September 02, 2012

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery, September 1941


How about a weird menace pulp? If you're not familiar with that subgenre, they were sort of horror, sort of mystery, and sort of spicy adventure. There were popular for only a few years, but during that time a lot of good authors turned out scores of creepy stories with logical explanations for all the apparently supernatural shenanigans going on.

I don't know about you, but with a cover like the one on the September 1941 issue of DIME MYSTERY, if I had a copy I'd be reading it right now. This is actually from the transitional period when DIME MYSTERY was becoming less of a weird menace pulp and more of a detective pulp, but clearly there are still some spooky goings-on in its pages. Hard to beat a magazine featuring Day Keene, Russell Gray (who was really Bruno Fischer), and William R. Cox, stalwart pulpsters all.

1 comment:

Todd Mason said...

And while such institutions of shudder as HORROR STORIES and TERROR TALES folded, and DIME MYSTERY changed its focus, there remained an undercurrent of shudder in popular fiction, not least magazine fiction, with DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE continuing to publish, along with every other sort of crime fiction, some relatively mild shudder stories, and such turn of the '60s titles as WEB TERROR (which had failed commercially as a not-bad sf magazine, then as a bottom-drawer imitation of MANHUNT, under different titles) decided to go even the most lurid of shudder pulp fiction (and it could get lurid in the '30s) or the more contemporaneous "true" men's sweat magazines one worse (or better, if you preferred) with heavy doses of sadism of every stripe...WEB thus staggered into the mid '60s, and a few other magazines (including a set where the entire contents were apparently written by cult-bad-filmmaker Ed Wood) followed in that mode...with a continuing trickle (perhaps the precisely correct term) up through today, where a few of the webzines aren't afraid to at least visit similar gutters, if not often to wallow as enthusiastically (though there are those, as well, and even worse-written).