The Weird Menace boom was over by the end of 1940, but STRANGE STORIES, a semi-Weird Menace pulp from the Thrilling Group was still hanging on. This is a good cover, a little reminiscent of the Spicy pulps. Good-looking girls sure had trouble keeping their clothes intact in those days. There are some good writers in this issue: Seabury Quinn, Norman A. Daniels, Don Alviso, Alexander Samalman. As well as some I've never heard of: Dorothy Quick, Joseph H. Hernandez, George J. Rawlins, and Dr. Arch Carr. Unusual to see a doctor using his title in a pulp magazine, but there you go. I wonder if he was a medical doctor. David H. Keller was always billed as David H. Keller, M.D.
UPDATE: The cover artist was the great Earle Bergey, who did six covers for STRANGE STORIES during its 13-issue run.
14 comments:
Interesting little article about Dorothy Quick. She knew Mark Twain: https://www.easthamptonstar.com/news/2019-05-06/dorothy-quick-friend-twain
Thanks, Bruce. I'll check it out.
Keller graduated from UPenn's School of Medicine and served as a neurophsycologist in both World Wars. He worked at the Louisiana State Mental Hospital and later in private prctive in New York. In addition to his science fiction and fantasy, he is noted for the 10-volume Sexual Education Series (1928), which was marketed through ads in the back pages of magazines.
STRANGE STORIES usually had a solid line-up of writers, icluding Bloch, Derleth Kuttner, Wellman, Frank Belknap Long, Ralph Milne Farley, Otis Adelbert Kline, E. Hoffman Price, Carl Jacobi, A. Hyatt Verrill, Russ Winterbotham, Ray Cummings, John Wyndham (as John Benyon), Eli Colter, Erice Frank Russell, Seabury Quinn, Leigh Brackett, Arthur J. burks,and Wyatt Blessingame. STRANGE STORIES only lasted for thirteen issues. **sigh**
That's a great bunch of authors! And the covers are pretty good, too. I'm surprised it didn't last longer. Just not the right time and place, I guess.
James, I love it when you post about magazines that are available online. This one is at: https://archive.org/details/strange-stories-v-04-n-03-1940-12_202011.
And yes, Strange Stories is a good one.
JasperAK, thanks for that link. I usually don't check the on-line status of the pulps I pick for this series, I just go with whatever catches my interest. But I'm glad so many pulps are available to read this way. So many good stories that won't be lost, at least for a while yet.
Cover painting by Earle K. Bergey, one of six covers Bergey did for this 13-issue title though he is often wrongly credited for painting more which are distinctly un-Bergey.
Thanks, Joshua. I love the pulp covers he did. One of my favorite artists!
And one of the aliases of Robert Bloch: Tarleton Fiske.
Tiziano Agnelli
I didn't know that! Thanks, Tiziano.
If I'm not mistaken, Keith Hammond in Vol. 1 No. 2 is Henry Kuttner, Tarleton Fiske is Robert Bloch, and Tally Mason is August Derleth. So that issue has Bloch, Bloch, Kuttner, Kuttner, Derleth, Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, and C.L. Moore. The only thing that could possibly make this issue better is some Leigh Brackett or Ray Bradbury.
I will say this, if this is some of these author's works that were rejected by other editors, then give me of all of their rejects, because these authors are the best of the best.
Talk about an all-star line-up! And that issue is on-line, too:
https://archive.org/details/Strange_Stories_v01n02_1939-04
I used a gift certificate to buy a facsimile reprint of that second issue.
STRANGE STORIES wasn't really a shudder pulp...it was a Lot more an attempt to mimic the latter-day Dorothy McIlwraith WEIRD TALES, without too much recourse to the reprints and a few other vestiges of the very Gothic flavor of WT under Farnsworth Wright (which is precisely the flavor that Donald Wollheim wanted to sustain in THE AVON FANTASY READER). For whatever reason, there wasn't much cross-promotion with the Thrilling Group sf pulps, and that didn't help it survive after Mort Weisinger moved on from Thrilling/Better to doing a similarly unimpressive job at SUPERMAN and other eventual DC compics.
Oddly enough, DIME MYSTERY (rather like S&S DETECTIVE STORY) never quite gave up on shudder, mixed in with other fiction, and usually a bit toned down, till their eventual folding.
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