SKY DEVILS was a short-lived (7 issues) air war pulp from the Red Circle group. This is the first issue, and it has a nice cover by J.W. Scott. Inside are some of the usual suspects--Robert Sidney Bowen, John Scott Douglas, and Anatole Feldman writing as Anthony Field--plus some names that may well be pseudonyms and/or house-names: Terry Dell, John Loring, John Carlisle, and "Ace" Denver (the by-line has the quotes in it). It wouldn't surprise me at all if all of those were either Bowen or Feldman.
This cover by W.C. Brigham is eye-catching for a couple of reasons: the sheer brutality of the scene depicted, plus the use of a swastika in the logo well before it gained notoriety for other reasons. THE UNDERWORLD MAGAZINE was an early gang pulp published by Harold Hersey, and if I recall correctly, a lot of Hersey's pulps used a swastika in their logos. There are some good authors in this issue including James P. Olsen and Galen C. Colin (both probably best remembered for their Westerns), Henry Leverage (one of the stars of the gang pulps, and he appears twice in this issue, once as himself and once under the name Carl Henry), Armitage Trail (the author of SCARFACE), veteran pulpsters Anatole Feldman and Harold Ward, and a couple of one-shot authors, Mack Ozark and W. Jeremiah Evans. Mack Ozark especially sounds like a pseudonym to me. I've read almost nothing from the gang pulps, and I really think I should explore them more. Just a matter of finding the time.
The cover by J.W. Scott for this issue of DETECTIVE SHORT STORIES looks more like it was done for a Weird Menace pulp, but hey, that's all right with me. The fumes rising from that beaker certainly are strategically placed, aren't they? Inside are stories by a couple of my favorite pulp authors, E. Hoffmann Price and Donald Barr Chidsey, along with the prolific Anatole Feldman (writing as Anthony Field), Oscar Schisgall, and assorted house-names and little known authors.
There’s a line of copy on the back cover of a recent volume reprinting this novel and three others in the same series that really sums up “Serrano of the Stockyards”:
Glorious Mayhem! Blazing Tommy Guns! Gangland Carnage! And a Bunch of Swell-Looking Frails!
Who could resist that? Some of you reading this, probably, but not me. I go for this stuff, see?
I’ve never read a lot of gangster pulp, but the short novels featuring Chicago mobster Big Nose Serrano come highly recommended, and they’ve been reprinted by the fine small press publisher Off-Trail Publications. The series originally appeared in the pulps GANGSTER STORIES, GREATER GANGSTER STORIES, and THE GANG MAGAZINE in the early Thirties, beginning with “Serrano of the Stockyards” in the May 1930 issue of GANGSTER STORIES.
As Will Murray notes in his fine introduction to the first reprint volume (which also includes “The Gang Buster”, “The Gunless Gunman”, and “Dames, Dice and the Devil”), this initial entry in the series is a blatant retelling of CYRANO DE BERGERAC, transported to the Chicago underworld. All the characters from Edmund Rostand’s play are there in recognizable form, most notably Big Nose Serrano, a singing, gunslinging, poetry-spouting mobster who’s the deadliest man with a gat in town. Unknown to any of the criminals he associates with, Big Nose is really an undercover operative for the District Attorney and is bent on wiping out the Chicago mobs. According to the introduction, this angle is dispensed with in subsequent stories, and to be honest, it doesn’t play much of a part in this first yarn, which finds Serrano helping another gangster woo the beautiful Annie, the moll he really loves.
As you can probably tell, the style used by author Anatole Feldman in this story is contagious. The prose is fast-paced, definitely over the top, and great fun. I don’t think Feldman himself took any of this too seriously. He seems to be enjoying himself, and as a reader, I did, too. I’ve read very little by Feldman in the past, but based on this story, he’s a pretty good writer. Although very different from Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner stories, the Big Nose Serrano saga seems to have the same sort of goofy charm. I plan to read more of the stories soon, and in the meantime, “Serrano of the Stockyards” gets a high recommendation from me if you’re a pulp fan.
