By the end of the Thirties, ARGOSY was wrapping up its run as one of the top pulps in the business. It would still publish plenty of excellent fiction for another decade, but it wasn't as strong overall as it was at its peak in the mid-Thirties. Despite that trend, this looks like a really strong issue with a good cover by Rudolph Belarski and stories by E. Hoffmann Price, Eustace L. Adams, Allan Vaughan Elston, Louis C. Goldsmith, Bennett Foster, Frank Richardson Pierce, and an installment of one of the occult detective novels by Jack Mann (E. Charles Vivian). Those are some fine writers. I need to read those Jack Mann novels.
My favorite era of ARGOSY is the mid-Thirties. Even in 1939 it was still a great pulp. This issue has a fine Viking cover by George Rozen and features stories by Jack Williamson, Richard Sale, Philip Ketchum, Robert Carse, Allan Vaughan Elston, Marco Page, Nard Jones, and a reprint by George W. Ogden. It would be hard to find a wider variety of adventure fiction than that, and all by top-notch authors, too.
A pith helmet, a swastika, a mysterious ring, a guy who looks a little like Robert Mitchum, and a red sun in the background . . . Yep, this is a cover for SHORT STORIES, one of the great adventure pulps. The artist is E. Franklin Wittmack. Authors on hand in this issue are H. Bedford-Jones, William MacLeod Raine, Allan Vaughan Elston, William R. Cox, Philip Ketchum, Fulton T. Grant, and H.S.M. Kemp. Since the dates on pulp magazines were off-sale dates, when newsstand employees would pull them to return, that means this issue was still on the stands 79 years ago today. You'd have to grab it before the next day if you wanted a copy.
Having read and enjoyed several of Elston's short stories lately, I decided to try one of his novels. This is the only one I had on my shelves. It's one of his later efforts, from 1966, but still has a very pulpish feel to it. It's the old vengeance plot -- cowboy from Wyoming comes to southern Arizona in 1880 to track down the varmints who murdered his brother -- but Elston does a good job with it, mixing in a lot of the history of the area and having his fictional characters interact believably with the Earps, Doc Holliday, etc., although for some reason he keeps the actual names for some historical characters and changes others (the Clantons become the Claytons, for example). The plot takes several twists to keep it interesting. Overall, THE LAWLESS BORDER is entertaining enough that I'll look for other books by Elston.
Pulp covers loved that bright red and yellow combination. Those are some scary-looking dogs on this cover by H.W. Scott, too. This issue of COMPLETE STORIES has some fine authors in it: Frederick C. Davis with a White Wolf story (ghosted under the name of the late Hal Dunning), George Harmon Coxe, Allan Vaughan Elston, Richard Howells Watkins, C.S. Montanye, Karl Detzer, and a pulpster I'm not familiar with, James Clarke. I've never read an issue of COMPLETE STORIES, but I know it doesn't have the same sort of reputation as the big-name general fiction pulps like ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, and SHORT STORIES. However, judging by the authors this looks like a pretty good issue.
Gangway! I'm not sure why I like this cover by L.J. Cronin, an artist I'm not familiar with, but I really do. It just seems dynamic to me. And of course, ADVENTURE had some pretty dynamic authors in its pages, too, including in this issue Talbot Mundy, with a story featuring a character named Ben Quorn (also unfamiliar to me), Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Allan Vaughan Elston, Thomson Burtis, Bill Adams, and Warren Hastings Miller, among others.
Lots of red to catch a potential reader's eye in this ARGOSY cover by George Rozen. Complete novelettes by Frank Richardson Pierce and Paul Ernst are pretty good selling points, too, along with serial installments by Allan Vaughan Elston, George Washington Ogden (a reprint of a serial from ALL-STORY in 1918), and Marco Page.
Another fine, colorful Rudolph Belarski cover on this issue of ARGOSY, one of my favorite pulps. This issue features an installment of the serial "Seven Footprints to Satan" by A. Merritt (reprinted from its original appearance in ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY in 1927), plus a South Seas novella by Allan Vaughan Elston and stories by Garnett Radcliffe, Walter C. Brown, and more serials by Walter Ripperger and Howard Rigsby. I'd love to have a complete run of ARGOSY from the Twenties and Thirties. So many great serials . . .
What a great era for ARGOSY this was. A Thibaut Corday yarn by Theodore Roscoe, serial installments by Lester Dent, Borden Chase, and Allan Vaughan Elston, plus stories by William Chamberlain and Richard Wormser. The readers back then definitely got their dime's worth of great adventure fiction.
