Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Mystery, Fall 1944

I don’t own a copy of this pulp, but I recently read the e-book version of it published by Radio Archives. I don’t know who painted the cover. Rudolph Belarski did a lot of covers for THRILLING MYSTERY during this era, but I don’t know Belarski’s work well enough to say one way or the other. THRILLING MYSTERY was long past its Weird Menace days by 1944, but this cover looks like it could have graced a Weird Menace pulp.

Instead, by this time THRILLING MYSTERY was more of a regular detective pulp. The lead novella in this issue, “Monarchs of Murder” by C.K.M. Scanlon, is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. The protagonist is Rex Parker, ace crime reporter for the New York Comet, who is also known as an amateur sleuth. It just so happens that Rex Parker was also the star of the lead novels in the pulp THE MASKED DETECTIVE, which ran from Fall 1940 through Spring 1943 for a total of twelve quarterly issues. Parker was also known as the Masked Detective in those stories, a secret identity known only to his girlfriend, fellow reporter Winnie Bligh, and his police contact, Detective Sergeant Gleason. Years ago, I read several of those Masked Detective stories that were reprinted by Tom Johnson’s Fading Shadows imprint and enjoyed all of them. I’m convinced “Monarchs of Murder” was written as a Masked Detective story, got orphaned when that pulp was canceled, and was rewritten to remove all the references to Rex Parker’s alter ego, which leads to one particularly goofy scene in which Parker dons a pair of goggles to conceal his identity, when he normally would have been wearing his mask in the original series.

The second thing I find interesting about “Monarchs of Murder” is that its authorship has been attributed to my old editor and mentor Sam Merwin Jr., who wrote at least three of the Masked Detective stories in that magazine’s run. (The main author was Norman Daniels, who wrote at least five of the original novels and probably created the character. The others were split up among Merwin, Robert Sidney Bowen, Laurence Donovan, and G.T. Fleming-Roberts.) Merwin was a consistently good writer, although he’s probably best remembered these days for his stints as the editor of various science fiction and mystery magazines. “Monarchs of Murder” finds Rex Parker battling a gang of Fifth Columnist saboteurs targeting the oil and gas industry, but the more Parker investigates, the more it appears something else may be going on. There’s plenty of action as Parker and Winnie are captured by the bad guys several different times and have to escape almost certain death. The plot moves along nicely, the clues are planted in a fair manner, and overall, this is an entertaining and satisfying wartime mystery yarn.

Next up is a novelette by an author I’ve long admired, Robert Bloch. At first glance, “Death is a Vampire” seems like it could have appeared in a Weird Menace pulp. The narrator/protagonist is a reporter, Dave Kirby, and the plot revolves around a spooky-looking house, a sinister guy with a vaguely European name (Igor Petroff), some art treasures, a beautiful blonde, a lawyer and a doctor who may be up to no good, and a supposed vampire running around killing people. But by the time the narrator makes a reference to the movie The Cat and the Canary, it’s pretty obvious that this is a prose version of a Bob Hope movie, with the wisecracking, somewhat cowardly reporter being written by Bloch with Hope in mind. It’s also a very entertaining story, a minor entry in Bloch’s career but a heck of a lot of fun. It was reprinted in the anthology TOUGH GUYS & DANGEROUS DAMES, used copies of which can be found pretty easily and inexpensively.

I think of Donald Bayne Hobart as a Western pulpster, but he wrote a lot of detective fiction, too, including nearly two dozen stories featuring private eye Mugs Kelly that ran in various Thrilling Group detective pulps. “Murder After Lunch” is a Mugs Kelly short story published in this issue, and it’s about first-person narrator Mugs returning to his office after lunch one day to find a dead guy sitting in his chair. Moments later, another guy appears to accuse him of the murder. The cops arrive, Mugs explains (in a pretty bland fashion) who really killed the victim, the end. This story went down easily enough due to Hobart’s veteran storytelling skills, but it sure wasn’t very filling.

“The Killer Was Careful” is a short-short by a forgotten pulpster named John X. Brown, who did only a few detective and air-war stories. It’s about a mild-mannered accountant who uncharacteristically murders a client and steals a bundle of cash and then has to worry about being caught. It’s the kind of twist ending “biter bit” story that would be popular in ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE a couple of decades later. I’m not a big fan of those unless they’re really well-done, and this one is just okay.

The issue wraps up with “The Spell of Death”, narrated by insurance investigator Dick Ames, who is on the trail of an embezzler when murder literally falls in his lap. It’s not a bad yarn, with what should have been an obvious clue to the murderer’s identity, but I overlooked it anyway. The author is A. Boyd Correll, a forgotten pulpster who wrote a couple of dozen detective stories for various pulps.

I enjoyed this issue. The stories by Merwin and Bloch are the stand-outs, with the others being okay but forgettable, but overall, it’s a nice, easy, entertaining read, just the sort of thing I need sometimes.