Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Far East Adventure Stories, January 1931

I don't know who painted the cover on this issue of FAR EAST ADVENTURE STORIES, but it's pretty eye-catching. That's a tough-looking Cossack. I assume he's the protagonist of Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's serial "The Red Cossack". This issue has a sterling lineup of authors that also includes H. Bedford-Jones, Hugh B. Cave, Lawrence G. Blochman, Chart Pitt, and Jack D'Arcy (D.L. Champion). Also on hand are W.C. Harding, better known under his pseudonym Anson Hard, along with H.C. Langer, real name Hedwig Langer (never heard of her), and newcomer H. DeWitt Thomason, who has no other credits in the Fictionmags Index, so his story here may well be the extent of his career. FAR EAST ADVENTURE STORIES didn't last long, only a dozen issues, but it published some good stuff.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, April 20, 1940

An issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY was the first actual pulp I ever owned, so I've always had a fondness for the magazine. This issue has a nice cover by Emmett Watson, who provided excellent covers for many Munsey pulps, and there's a strong line-up of authors inside: Donald Barr Chidsey (with a Morton and McGarvey story), Hugh B. Cave, D.L. Champion, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Walter Ripperger (who was a very prolific author of detective and adventure yarns for various Munsey pulps but almost completely forgotten now, probably because apparently he never wrote any novels), and a couple of authors unknown to me, Lois Ames and B.B. Fowler. Like ARGOSY, DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY is a frustrating title for collectors because it ran a lot of serials, but there's plenty of good stuff in those pages anyway. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective Magazine, November 1945

I love Sam Cherry's Western pulp covers--and he did a lot of 'em!--but he painted quite a few non-Western covers, too, and they're all very good like this one on an issue of DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE. That fellow looks a lot like Boris Karloff to me. The group of authors inside is a strong one, too, with T.T. Flynn, D.L. Champion, and G.T. Fleming-Roberts leading the way, plus a couple of lesser-known authors in Fergus Truslow (a distinctive name, but not anyone whose work I've ever read as far as I recall) and Jean Prentice (her only credit in the Fictionmags Index). Flynn, Champion, Fleming-Roberts, and Cherry are plenty to make this issue noteworthy.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Mystery, December 1935

This is the second issue of THRILLING MYSTERY, launched by the Thrilling Group to compete with the success of Popular Publications’ leading Weird Menace pulp DIME MYSTERY. I don’t know who did the cover, but it’s plenty garish and eye-catching. An e-book reprint of this pulp is available from Radio Archives, so being both time- and attention span-challenged, I read it recently.

Wyatt Blassingame was one of the top Weird Menace authors over at Popular, so it’s no surprise to find him leading off this issue with a novelette called “The Flame Demon”. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Blassingame, but unfortunately, this yarn about a villain calling himself the God of Fire comes across to me as pretty uninspired. There are some nice action scenes—lots of big fires, and the protagonist finds himself in a really harrowing position—but Blassingame seems to have phoned in the muddled plot, which requires quite a bit of unconvincing exposition in the final pages to explain. I don’t have any way of knowing, of course, but I suspect that Rogers Terrill at Popular rejected this story and Harvey Burns, the editor at THRILLING MYSTERY, snapped it up because of Blassingame’s name recognition in the genre.

“Voice From Hell”, a short story by Jack D’Arcy (really D.L. Champion, creator of the Phantom Detective), is a Poe-like tale with a clever twist to it about a murderer tormented by his crime. It’s a slight but enjoyable story and an improvement over Blassingame’s novelette.

This issue really begins to pick up steam with “Ghouls of the Green Web”, a novelette from the dependable G.T. Fleming-Roberts. It’s set in a small Kansas city during the Dust Bowl, one of the few pulp stories I’ve read to use that bit of real-life history in its plot. Fleming-Roberts does a really nice job with it, too. The writing is excellent. Fleming-Roberts’ prose can be lurid, over the top, and genuinely creepy when it needs to be, and then turn around and achieve a terse, hardboiled, poetic effect. The menace seems a bit more realistic than some, as well. I really enjoyed this one.

I don’t know anything about James Duncan, author of the novelette “Blood in the Night” except that his real name was Arthur Pincus and that he wrote dozens of mystery, detective, and Weird Menace stories for a variety of pulps. His story in this issue is a bit of a kitchen-sink tale, with a witch’s curse, murders that appear to have been committed by a vampire, and an old house full of heirs to a fortune who benefit by knocking each other off, a set-up reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel, plus a master detective who is, at least, nothing like Hercule Poirot. Duncan pulls it all together and makes it work in a reasonably entertaining fashion.

Likewise, I know very little about Saul W. Paul, author of the short story “Forest of Fear”. That appears to have been his real name, and he sold about a dozen stories in the Thirties, mostly to the Spicy pulps. This story, about a honeymooning young couple who encounter a deadly menace in the woods, is only borderline Weird Menace and has nothing even apparently supernatural about it, but it does strike a few nicely creepy notes.

Arthur J. Burks was a million-words-a-year man, so I’m surprised I haven’t read more by him, only a few stories here and there. His novelette in this issue, “Demons in the Dust”, is another Dust Bowl yarn, but Burks carries the situation so far that this story reads more like post-apocalyptic science fiction than Weird Menace. And as post-apocalyptic SF, it’s not bad, although the plot—the protagonist and his newlywed wife try to escape from a particularly bad dust storm—is a little thin. But there’s lots of action and it’s well-written, making for a bleak but satisfying tale.

H.M. Appel is another author I’m not familiar with, except for seeing on the Fictionmags Index that he wrote several dozen stories for various Weird Menace and detective pulps. His short story “Hooks of Death” isn’t really Weird Menace, either, despite being fairly grisly in places. It’s about a young highway patrolman’s pursuit of a serial killer stalking a particular stretch of road. The prose has plenty of momentum and the hero’s background furnishes a nice twist.

Jack Williamson isn’t a name I expected to encounter in the Table of Contents in a Weird Menace pulp, but in addition to being one of the giants of science fiction, Williamson also wrote a considerable amount of fantasy and horror, so it’s not that much of a stretch. His novelette “Grey Arms of Death” is about some very Cthulhu-like creatures from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean stalking some deep-sea explorers and invading a lonely cliffside mansion. I don’t know if Williamson ever read Lovecraft, but based on this story I feel like there’s a good chance he did. This is pure Weird Menace, and Williamson, already a very seasoned pro in 1935, throws himself into the breakneck, lurid prose with great gusto. This is a fast-moving and very entertaining story, probably my favorite in the whole issue.

Overall, this issue of THRILLING MYSTERY is a satisfying read, even though some of the stories don’t fit the Weird Menace genre that well. I have no way of knowing, but since it was only the second issue, I suspect that the stories by Duncan, Paul, and Appel were intended originally for POPULAR DETECTIVE or possibly as back-ups in THE PHANTOM DETECTIVE and were pulled out of inventory to go in THRILLING MYSTERY. But that’s pure speculation on my part.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, February 1942

I hope whoever has that gun hands it to the babe in the red dress. She looks a lot more capable of using it than that doofus she's tied up with. I don't know who painted this cover. Inside this issue of DETECTIVE TALES is an absolutely top-notch group of writers: Fredric Brown, Day Keene, John K. Butler, D.L. Champion, Stewart Sterling, John Hawkins, Curt Hamlin, Edward S. Williams, and William Benton Johnston. I'm not familiar with the last one of those guys, but I'll bet he was a pretty good writer to crack a Popular Publications pulp. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, August 1936

I don't know the artist (Richard Lyon, maybe?), but this is an eye-catching cover on this issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES. Nor am I familiar with Crawford Sullivan, evidently the real name of the author who wrote the featured story. But I know the work of the other authors in this one: Tom Curry, Frederick C. Painton, Jack D'Arcy (D.L. Champion), Chart Pitt, S. Gordon Gurwit, and William Merriam Rouse. An adventurous bunch, indeed!

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Mystery, October 1936

Well, here's a cover with a little bit of everything! THRILLING MYSTERY may not have been the best-known of the Weird Menace pulps, but it had some good covers and authors. Inside this issue are stories by top pulpsters John H. Knox, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Frank Belknap Long, D.L. Champion (writing as Jack D'Arcy), Frederick C. Painton, and none other than Leslie Scott, best remembered for his Westerns, of course, writing under his pseudonym A. Leslie. A very entertaining issue, I'll bet.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Double Detective, March 1939

We've got a gun-totin' clown and a monkey in this Rudolph Belarski cover from DOUBLE DETECTIVE, which means, of course, that I like it. It would be even better if the monkey had a knife, but that's just me, I guess. This issue also has a great line-up of authors inside: Richard Sale, D.L. Champion, Philip Ketchum, Donald Barr Chidsey, John H. Knox, Edwin Truett Long, Wyatt Blassingame, and G.T. Fleming-Roberts. That's some high-powered stuff.

Forgotten Books: Run the Wild River - D.L. Champion

Sometimes you come across little gems in unexpected places. I’ve been reading D.L. Champion’s pulp work for decades, since he created one of my favorite characters, the Phantom Detective, and wrote many of the early novels in the pulp of that name. Until recently, though, I was unaware that he’d also written a hardboiled crime novel, RUN THE WILD RIVER, originally published in paperback by Lion Books in 1952, with a cover by Mort Kunstler. It’s being reprinted soon by Stark House Press as part of a triple volume of Lion Books.

The plot of a heel’s rise to power in some criminal enterprise is a common one in hardboiled and noir fiction, and that’s what you get in RUN THE WILD RIVER. The narrator, Bill Ackroyd, is a heel, no doubt about that. A young grifter, he gets kicked out of both El Paso and Juarez and finds himself stranded in a small, seedy town on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. But Bill is the kind of guy who always figures out a way to land on his feet, so before you know it he becomes a cog in a local smuggling network that takes Mexican laborers across the river and sells them into virtual slavery in Texas. Bill has his sights set on being more than a henchman, though—no matter who he has to double-cross or even kill to accomplish that goal. He even succeeds . . . but then a beautiful blonde shows up and brings with her the potential to wreck everything, as beautiful blondes usually do.

Champion’s many years of writing for the pulps taught him how to pace a story, that’s for sure. RUN THE WILD RIVER really races along, and Champion accomplishes the difficult task of making the reader care about, even root for, his protagonist, no matter how awful a person that protagonist is—and Bill Ackroyd’s pretty bad. The other characters also border on stereotypes, but Champion makes all of them interesting, too, and he does a fine job with the squalid settings.

I have to admit, I saw the big twist in the story coming as soon as Champion introduced it, and I also felt like the plot could have used yet one more twist at the end. But neither of those things detracted much from my enjoyment of this novel. I really enjoyed reading RUN THE WILD RIVER, and I sure wish Champion had continued writing books like this. However, this is the only one we’ve got, so if you’re a fan of hardboiled and noir crime fiction, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, February 1939

There's really a lot happening on the cover of this issue of DETECTIVE TALES. Action galore, which I like. And I'll bet there's plenty of action in the stories by Wyatt Blassingame (one under his own name and one as by William B. Rainey), Bruno Fischer (writing as Russell Gray), G.T. Fleming-Roberts, D.L. Champion, Robert Sidney Bowen, and John G. Pearsol (better known for his Westerns).

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Mystery Book Magazine, Summer 1950

"The Best in New Detective Fiction", this cover from MYSTERY BOOK MAGAZINE proclaims, and I think they could make a persuasive argument. Inside this issue are "The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches" by Fredric Brown, also known as one of the famous Dell 10 Cent Books (see below), as well as stories by John D. MacDonald, Philip Ketchum, D.L. Champion (creator of the long-running Phantom Detective series), the house-name John L. Benton, and a couple of authors I've never heard of, Jonathan Joseph and Bryant Ford. I don't know if that's actually the best, but it's pretty darned good.

Zombies From the Pulps!: The Grave Gives Up - Jack D'arcy (D.L. Champion)

Jack D'arcy was one of the pseudonyms of prolific pulpster D.L. Champion, who created the long-running pulp series The Phantom Detective, which took a lot of its elements from an earlier Champion story, "Alias Mr. Death" (if I'm remembering my pulp history correctly, which is never a sure thing these days). Champion wrote a bunch of the early Phantom Detective novels, and I've read a bunch of them and enjoyed them. I didn't know he'd written Weird Menace stories, although that doesn't surprise me. His novelette "The Grave Gives Up", from the August 1936 issue of THRILLING MYSTERY, is the first of that genre by him that I've read, and I liked it quite a bit.

The story opens with the protagonist, Gordon Lane, getting a phone call from his fiancée pleading for help. The catch here is that said fiancée was killed in a car crash two weeks earlier. Lane, who works for the county attorney's office, is able to get the call traced, and when he discovers that it came from the caretaker's house in the cemetery where his late fiancée is buried, we're off to the races as he tries to get to the bottom of this macabre mystery.

Nobody's going to be very surprised by the outcome of this story—the main villain might as well be wearing a sign—but it's certainly a lot of fun getting there. The pace never lets up, and there are plenty of creepy scenes described in breathless, semi-hysterical prose. Champion was very good at this sort of over-the-top pulp storytelling, which is also common in his Phantom Detective novels. This is another strong entry in ZOMBIES FROM THE PULPS!, and at the halfway point of the collection I can honestly say that there hasn't been a bad story in the bunch. I've enjoyed all of them and look forward to reading the rest.