I don't know who did the cover on this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE, but how can you go wrong with a good-looking, redheaded female cabbie with a skeleton in the back seat? The best-known authors in this issue (which I don't own) are Edward S. Aarons writing under his pseudonym Edward Ronns, C.S. Montanye, and Allan K. Echols, best remembered for his Westerns. Also on hand are Benton Braden (twice, once under his own name and once as Walter Wilson) and Armstrong Livingston, plus house-name John L. Benton.
I like oil derrick covers. It's kind of an odd thing, I know, but it probably comes from spending quite a bit of time in West Texas when I was young. This COMPLETE STORIES cover is by Gerard Delano. COMPLETE STORIES strikes me as one of Street & Smith's lesser pulps, but some good authors appeared in its pages. This issue has stories by William E. Barrett, Hal Dunning (a White Wolf story), C.S. Montanye, Lawrence C. Blochman, and Bertrand Sinclair, among others.
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.
I don't know about you, but I don't remember the last time I read a gripping polo story. Or any kind of polo story, for that matter. But C.S. Montanye provides one in this issue of the long-running pulp TOP-NOTCH. Montanye is best remembered, if at all, as one of the authors of the Phantom Detective novels under the house-name Robert Wallace. In fact, I think I recall reading that Montanye died in the middle of writing a Phantom novel and someone else had to finish it. He had a long, prolific career in a variety of pulps, though. Other authors of note in this issue are Burt L. Standish, S. Omar Barker, Hapsburg Liebe, Nels Leroy Jorgensen, and William Merriam Rouse. Actually, I kind of like that cover and the title "When the Mallet Flashed". If I was going to read a polo story, it might be that one.
