Both stories featured on the cover of this issue of DETECTIVE NOVELS are by Norman A. Daniels, a stand-alone novella under his own name and a novella in the Candid Camera Kid series as by John L. Benton. Other authors in this issue include Oscar J. Friend (perhaps better known as an agent) writing as Owen Fox Jerome and lesser-known pulpsters Hal White and W. Fredric Kruger. I don't know the cover artist, but that guy looks suitably menacing. In 1944, I doubt if that little mustache was a coincidence, although he doesn't look like Hitler in any other respect.
It's safe to say that Norman A. Daniels wrote more than half of this issue of DETECTIVE NOVELS MAGAZINE, since he has two novellas in it, one under his own name and an entry in his excellent Candid Camera Kid series as John L. Benton. In addition, there's a story by house-name J.S. Endicott, which might well be Daniels, too, and a story by an author named Temple Franklin who has only one credit in the Fictionmags Index, so that might be a Daniels pseudonym, too. We'll probably never know. The other author in this issue is the little known but apparently real Arthur W. Phillips. I don't know who did the cover art, but the scene has a lot going on and I like it.
This issue of DETECTIVE NOVELS sports about as busy a pulp cover as you'll see. The lead story is a Candid Camera Kid novel by Norman A. Daniels writing as John L. Benton. I've read several of the Candid Camera Kid stories, featuring diminutive but two-fisted newspaper photographer Jerry Wade, and I found them very enjoyable. If somebody wanted to reprint that series, I wouldn't mind at all and certainly would buy such volumes. Also in this issue is a story by my old mentor, Sam Merwin Jr., and yarns by a couple of writers I'm not familiar with, Victor Hailey and Louis Owens. But for me, this issue would be worth reading just for the Daniels and Merwin stories.
