Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sinister Stories, March 1940

SINISTER STORIES was the shortest-lived of Popular Publications' Weird Menace pulps, lasting only three issues in 1940. All three issues recycled covers from TERROR TALES. This one is particularly racy. I don't know the artist. The stories were all new, as far as I can tell. The best-known authors in this issue, at least these days, are Russell Gray (who was really Bruno Fischer) and Robert Leslie Bellem. Some of the others were familiar names to Weird Menace fans, though, such as Donald Dale (Mary Dale Buckner) and Francis James (James A. Goldthwaite), while Raymond Whetstone, William Brailsford, and Richard G. Huzarski are all pretty obscure, at least to me. SINISTER STORIES came along at the tail-end of the Weird Menace era, or it might have lasted longer. It certainly doesn't look like a bad pulp for that genre.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Strange Detective Mysteries, September 1940

You don't get much more lurid than this cover for STRANGE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES. I don't know who the artist is, but he's just crammed the action and menace into this one. Inside are stories by Emile C. Tepperman, Donald G. Cormack, R.S. Lerch, Raymond Whetstone (sounds like a pseudonym, but apparently his real name), and Donald Dale, who was really Mary Dale Buckner, one of the few female authors to write Weird Menace yarns. I don't see how the contents could live up to that cover, but you never know.