I like the cover on this issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY. I don't know who the artist is. Paul Stahr, maybe? There are some fine writers inside, including Max Brand, Cornell Woolrich, Borden Chase, Hulbert Footner, Howard Wandrei (as H.W. Guernsey), and J. Lane Linklater. Like the other Munsey pulps, the frequent serials are a bit of a problem with DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, but there was still an awful lot of good fiction to be found in those pages.
Yes, the serials are annoying and the bane of a collector's existence, but I love ARGOSY anyway. There was just so much fine fiction and so many great authors to be found in its pages. This issue has a cover by Paul Stahr, who did most of them for the magazine during the Thirties. The lead story is a circus yarn by John Wilstach. I haven't read this one, but I've read other circus stories by Wilstach and enjoyed them all. Also on hand are Frederick Faust (twice, as Max Brand and Dennis Lawton), H. Bedford-Jones, Borden Chase, Anthony M. Rud, and Hapsburg Liebe. And that's just a typical issue of ARGOSY in the Thirties, the magazine's glory days as far as I'm concerned.
ARGOSY was still a full-fledged pulp in 1940, as you can probably tell by this octopus-fighting cover by Rudolph Belarski. Despite Foster-Harris's name being on the cover, he's not listed in the contents for this issue in the Fictionmags Index. However, there are stories by Donald Barr Chidsey, Johnston McCulley, Borden Chase, Robert Arthur, Jack Byrne, Kenneth Perkins, and David V. Reed, so that's no shortage of good authors.
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.
