Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, June 1945

The cover of this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE caught my eye and intrigued me enough to read a PDF of the issue downloaded from the Internet Archive. Carnivals were common settings for pulp detective yarns and I’ve always enjoyed carny fiction. I don’t know who did this cover, but there’s a lot going on and I like it.

It's also an extremely accurate representation of a scene in the short story “Clown of Doom” by John L. Benton, a Thrilling Group house-name commonly used by Norman A. Daniels but also by Oscar J. Friend and Donald Bayne Hobart. The narrator/protagonist is named Ed Rice, which instantly rings some bells and raises some questions. Was John L. Benton, in this case, actually Emile C. Tepperman, and is “Clown of Doom” really an entry in Tepperman’s long-running Ed Race series which ran as back-up stories in THE SPIDER? Maybe an editor at Popular Publications rejected the story so Tepperman changed one letter in his hero’s name and sent it over to the Thrilling Group? Ed Race, after all, was a juggler and trickshot artist who had many adventures set in the carnival world.

Well, I can’t prove it, of course, but my answer to both of the questions I posed above is “I don’t think so.” For one thing, Ed Rice, in this story, is a spieler, a ballyhoo guy, not a marksman or juggler. The story is told in slangy, present-tense, first-person narration that doesn’t sound anything like Tepperman’s Ed Race stories. And the fact that the scene on the cover exactly matches the action in the story makes me believe that a lot more likely scenario is that this yarn was written to match an already existing cover painting. The author was probably one of the regular contributors to POPULAR DETECTIVE and the other Thrilling Group detective pulps. Whatever the truth of this situation is, the story is a pretty good one, a fast-paced yarn about a murder at a traveling carnival.

Elsewhere, the issue leads off with the novella “Motto For Murder” by Frank Johnson, also a Thrilling Group house-name used mostly by Norman A. Daniels. My hunch is that he didn’t write this story, but he might have. Private eye Rufus Reed and his two partners, his wife Pat and his younger brother Johnny, are hired to find out who’s been knocking off defendants in high-profile murder trials right after they’ve been found not guilty. It’s a fairly interesting plot and there are some excellent action scenes, but the characters are all kind of bland and I never was as intrigued as I hoped to be. Not a terrible story, but certainly forgettable.

“Pilot to Murderer” is by Walt Sheldon, a prolific pulpster who went on to a career as a well-respected paperback novelist in the Fifties and Sixties. It has a great concept: the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber on a top-secret mission discovers that there’s a murderer among them. It's up to the pilot, who also narrates the story, to figure out who the killer is. This is a terrific story that lives up to the idea. I really need to read more by Sheldon.

“Death By Proxy” by M.D. Orr is part of a series featuring British Intelligence agent Archie McCann, who battles Japanese espionage plots in New Guinea while pretending to be an anthropologist. This is the first one I’ve read. In this story, a would-be assassin turns up dead, so Archie has to solve the murder of a man who tried to kill him. The setting and the concept are great, and Archie is a likable, interesting protagonist, but the writing never worked up much urgency or suspense for me. Still, there’s enough to like that I’d be interested in reading more in the series.

Mel Watt’s novelette “The Chair Is Not Cheated” features as its sleuth an actor who plays the villainous Dr. Coffin on a radio crime drama. He has to turn detective in real life when a friend of his is accused in what seems to be an open-and-shut case of murder. What really happened is pretty predictable, but the story moves along at a decent pace. Watt could have done more with the radio background, too. Although it reads like the start of a series, this is the only “Dr. Coffin” story of which I’m aware.

Joe Archibald wrote a long (approximately 70 stories) series about private detective Willie Klump, all of which appeared in POPULAR DETECTIVE except the final two, which were published in THE SAINT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE and MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. These are comedy detective yarns, a sub-genre which, like comedy Westerns, I don’t usually care for. I had never read a Willie Klump story before, and I’m not a big fan of Archibald’s work in general, so “The Witness Share” in this issue kind of had two strikes against it to start with. But there are always exceptions, so I was willing to give it a chance, and I’m glad I did. Willie is a hapless, wise-cracking narrator who, like W.C. Tuttle’s Tombstone and Speedy, isn’t as dumb as he seems at first. In fact, he’s fairly sharp as he solves a case of jewel robbery and murder.  I enjoyed this story quite a bit more than I expected to, and I’d be happy to read more about Willie Klump.

Overall, this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE is a really mixed bag. None of the stories are terrible and I had no trouble finishing all of them. Only one, “Pilot to Murderer”, is outstanding, but “Clown of Doom” and “The Witness Share” aren’t bad. The others all have something going for them, even if they didn’t have me flipping the digital pages with a great deal of enthusiasm. I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. This issue is okay and I’m glad I read it, and I found enough to like that I might read another issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE in the reasonably near future. Just not right away.