What says "adventure" more than a skull wearing a pith helmet? This late issue of ADVENTURE the pulp features a dandy cover by Monroe Eisenberg and stories by F.R. Buckley, William Chamberlain, W.L. Heath, Gordon McCreagh, Albert Richard Wetjen, and John Prescott. This is long past ADVENTURE's glory days but still looks like a pretty darned good magazine to me.
3 comments:
This is a great cover but you are right about Adventure's best years being over. By 1952 they were using reprints and this issue has one of the novelettes reprinted from 1939. By the next year, 1953, the pulp era was over after 753 issues, 1910-1953. The magazine continued as a men's adventure magazine in the larger format like ARGOSY. The end came in 1971 after 3 sorry looking digest format issues.
I hate to disagree with you, Walker, but this particular issue of Adventure actually lives up to the standard of Adventure issues in the forties.
There's a new Caradosso story, Red Runs My Blade, from F.R. Buckley, and this one is a crackerjack story of betrayal and revenge over many years.
The Jawbone of Shamus Macroom, while a reprint, is a great biblical story of retribution set in the Phillipines with a OIrish hero.
W.L. Heath's tale of a fisherman's final battle with the one that got away, Big Dark, was good too. It has shades of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, but came out before that was published.
With South of Sudden Death, Albert Richard Wetjen, comes up with another of his tough old men of the sea.
Gordon MacCreagh's story of a Caribbean buccaneer, Blood of the Hawk, is a romance that would not have been printed in Hoffman's Adventure, but is still a good swashbuckler.
I didn't really enjoy the other two stories, Devil in the Sky and An Incident of Massacre, but the others deliver more than 25 cents of value.
I just read most of this issue and as Sai points out, it is one of the better later issues, certainly comparable to the forties. But generally speaking, I still think the early 1950's show a decline from the 1940's. The six digest sized issues especially are a disappointment with so many reprints, the smaller page count, and less illustrations.
I do want to second the praise for the Caradosso story by Buckley. He did 38 of them for ADVENTURE during 1924-1953 and most are excellent. They deserve to be reprinted in a collection.
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