The glory days of the pulp magazine ADVENTURE are considered
to be the Teens and the Twenties, and it was still a force to be reckoned with
during the Thirties. But it was bought by Popular Publications and by the late
Forties was thought to be just a shadow of what it once was. And that may well
be true. But here's the thing: it was still a pretty darned entertaining pulp.
Case in point, the September 1947 issue, which I read recently.
First of all, that's a fine cover by Rafael DeSoto. Jungle?
Check. Stalwart, hairy-chested hero? Check. Sinister native fetish? Check.
Blazing gun? Check. Big-ass snake? You betcha! Even if it doesn't go with any
of the stories in the issue, it's a heck of a cover.
The issue's contents start off with the novella
"According to His Lights" by William Chamberlain. I had read several
of Chamberlain's YA war novels, but this was the first pulp yarn of his that
I'd read, at least as far as I remember. This one opens with a couple of
officers visiting Corregidor after the war, then flashes back to the days in
the Thirties when they were young lieutenants stationed there and their clashes
with a harsh and uncompromising commanding officer. I had a pretty good idea
what was going to happen in this one, but I like Chamberlain's no-frills style
and the story has an undeniable air of authenticity about it, probably because
in addition to being a pulpster he was also a career soldier and retired as a
brigadier general in the Air Force in 1946 to concentrate on his writing
career. I'll definitely be on the lookout for more of Chamberlain's work.
John Scott Douglas was a prolific pulp author from the
Twenties to the Fifties. His short story "Deep-Water Decision" is
about a couple of highly competitive deep sea divers, each of whom is willing
to endanger his own life to show up the other one. It's an okay story, if not
particularly memorable.
Fred Gipson is best known as the author of the novels OLD
YELLER and SAVAGE SAM, but before that he wrote quite a few Western stories for
the pulps. "Hell and Holy Water" is a humorous story about a couple
of mischievous boys, a big sister's romance with a bronc rider, blackmail, and
a runaway team of horses. Pretty good stuff that does a fine job of capturing
rural Texas.
"Eskimo No Cry" by Howard Stephenson is set in
post-war Alaska, but that's all I got out of it because it's written in the
form of a report from some bureaucrat and it's so dry I gave up after a few
pages.
C.P. Donnel, Jr.'s "Ashes to Ashes" is a
short-short about an incredibly lucky bartender and the unlikely source of that
luck. It's amusing, but I'm not sure what it's doing in ADVENTURE. It strikes
me more as something that should have appeared in one of the slicks.
"Escape to El Dorado" by Allison W. Bunkley is
billed as a "Fact Story", and it reminds me of the sort of yarn that
would show up more often a few years later when ADVENTURE became more of a
general interest men's magazine with a lot of non-fiction in it. Ostensibly
it's about a new search by helicopter for Colonel H.P. Fawcett, the British
explorer who disappeared in the Mato Grosso in 1925. That's really just an
excuse for a recap of Fawcett's expedition and disappearance and the subsequent
sightings and theories about what happened to him. It's pretty interesting
stuff. I believe there was a new book about Fawcett and his disappearance
written just a few years ago, so some people are still trying to figure out
what happened to him.
Next up is a serial installment from a novel by James
Norman, HE WHO RIDES THE TIGER. Didn't read this one, either, since it's part
four of five.
"The Man Who Didn't Like Texas" by Clifton Adams
is an oilfield story about an epic fistfight and feud between a massive
roughneck and an icy-nerved nitroglycerin expert who "shoots" the
wells with nitro to bring them in. Adams is a fine Western writer who knew his
way around the oil patch, and this is an excellent story with plenty of action
and humor, told in first-person narrative resembling that of Robert E. Howard's
Breckinridge Elkins without being quite as slapstick.
"A Pig for Muana Loa" by Carl J. Kunz (a writer
unknown to me – and to the Fictionmags Index) is a pretty good story about the
clash of cultures and a volcanic eruption in Hawaii.
Earl Sutterfield is another mystery. I can't find anything about
him. But his story "When Your Number's Up", about a crew working on a
railroad tunnel through a mountain, is okay. Lots of detail about tunnel work
mixed in with a decent story that's marred by an ending I didn't care for.
Eustace Cockrell had a fairly long career as a pulp writer,
but based on "1:54 and a Fraction", I'm not sure I see how. It's a
trifle about harness racing that never caught my interest.
Plus assorted columns and departments.
So overall, this is a good but certainly not great issue of
ADVENTURE. It has that fine cover going for it, plus three pretty good stories
(by Chamberlain, Gipson, and Adams). The rest of the contents are pretty much
forgettable. The biggest drawback is that several of the stories seem more like
they were intended for the slick magazine market, rather than being pulp yarns,
and they just weren't, well, adventurous enough. Still, it's an issue worth
reading, even if you just pick and choose the good stuff.
8 comments:
I'm glad you mentioned the subject of ADVENTURE in the 1940's. Many collectors think the only good years were the teens, twenties, and to a lesser extent, the thirties. But I've done extensive reading in the forties and the magazine was good then also. True, the best years are the twenties but you can't go wrong with the forties.
I think Popular Publications turned ADVENTURE into something more like ARGOSY after it was turned into a non-pulp "men's" magazine. There are treasures to be found in 1940s issues of ADVENTURE. E. Hoffmann Price had a series about guerrillas in the Philippine Islands fighting the Japanese in the mid-1940s.
The book about Percy Fawcett is THE LOST CITY OF Z by David Grann, and is a terrific read. I really enjoy this blog.
Kurt,
Thanks for the info. I think I need to read that Fawcett book.
Adventure is something that happens on the frontier, and by the 30's the frontiers were rapidly shrinking. Then came the war and it became ever harder to sell a story set in Borneo to people who actually fought there.
Another great review on a great blog. One tiny nit: the Air Force didn't exist in 1946; it was created a year later. Up til then it was the USAAF, an arm of the US Army. I've heard that some idiots want to merge the two branches again. What a mess that would be.
Excellent points in the previous two comments. I knew the Air Force started out as part of the Army but would have had to look up exactly when the split took place. I don't see the logic in wanting to merge them again after all this time. Do people think it would cut costs?
I'm among those who haven't much cared for Forties issues of ADVENTURE, but I'm slowly coming around. It might be because I had the bad luck to read a handful of post-WWII issues that seemed identical. Seemed like every other story was about a two-fisted lug trying to salvage something or other from a ship torpedoed by the Japs or Germans during the conflict. But I picked up some sharp early-Forties numbers at last year's PulpFest, and they were pretty good. I expect I'll wind up expanding my run of the magazine -- which currently ends in the late Thirties while Howard Bloomfield was still editor -- if only because Forties issues are cheap and plentiful. I'm getting tired of trying to fill in lengthy runs or complete files of expensive and hard-to-find pulps.
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