Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, August 1933

I don’t actually own that many detective pulps (although a 1931 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY was the first actual pulp I ever owned), so when I’m in the mood to read one, I often head for the Internet Archive. That’s where I recently read the August 1933 issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE. I don’t know who painted the cover. While it’s not a great one, it’s certainly not bad.

Ed Lybeck is a mostly forgotten writer these days. A few years ago, Altus Press published a collection of the four stories he wrote for BLACK MASK, which I read and thought was excellent. Lybeck wrote the lead novella in this issue, “Coins of Murder”, in which a Secret Service agent with the unlikely name Everard Kynaston literally stumbles over a case involving murder, a Chinese tong, and a scheme to destroy the American economy by flooding it with a previously unknown supply of gold. The plot is pretty weak, the criminal mastermind might as well be wearing a big sign on his back that reads CRIMINAL MASTERMIND, and the story reminds me a little of some of Sax Rohmer’s later Fu Manchu novels without being anywhere near as good. However, Lybeck’s lean, gritty prose is fun to read, and the opening pages of this yarn are particularly effective. This isn’t as good as the stories Lybeck wrote for BLACK MASK, but it’s worth reading if your expectations aren’t too high.

“The Corpse From Chicago” is a novelette with an intriguing opening: a hotshot gangster from the Windy City is murdered while sitting in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, surrounded by people, and yet nobody saw who killed him. A tough police detective gets the case and the story is almost non-stop action after that as he uncovers a war between two gangs of crooks trying to take over the marijuana racket. I’d never heard of the author of this one, James H.S. Moynihan, but he published almost a hundred detective and gang stories in various pulps during the Thirties and Forties. This one is okay. I’m not sure the plot completely makes sense, but Moynihan’s terse prose races right along nicely.

“The Giordano Mob” actually is non-stop action, as private detective Ed King goes after the gangsters responsible for the death of a young operative who works for the same agency. King is known as the Speed Demon, for some reason, and refuses to use a gun or knife, relying only on his fists as he battles the bad guys. This story is part of a series of his adventures written by a forgotten pulpster named Barry Brandon. Other than King’s canine sidekick, there’s not much memorable about this one. The plot’s just too thin to amount to much.

“Picture Frame” by H.M. Appel is an actual murder mystery built around photographic tricks and an isolated cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan where a group of men have an informal gun club devoted to skeet shooting. One of them winds up dead, of course, and it’s pretty obvious the killer can be found among the other three. This is the sort of short, bland yarn that showed up frequently in the mystery digests of later decades such as EQMM and AHMM. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not very compelling.

Perley Poore Sheehan was a prolific, well-regarded author of adventure fiction in the pulps, but he also wrote detective yarns, including a series about a masked crimefighter known as Doctor Coffin, who was actually a retired Hollywood character actor who also owned a chain of undertaking parlors. I think there were 15 of these novelettes, some of which have been collected, but I’d never read any until “The Chicken King” in this issue. And it really has me scratching my head, because this tale of Doctor Coffin battling the head of “the poultry racket” is just terrible. The plot makes no sense, and the writing, other than a few outbursts of lurid violence, is bland and boring. This is the next-to-last story in the series, and it reads as if the author were tired of it. I really ought to try some of Sheehan’s other work, because he couldn’t have been this bad all the way through his career.

Allan K. Echols is remembered mostly as a Western writer, but he wrote crime, detective, and Weird Menace stories, too. “The Murder Trail” in this issue is about a would-be crook who decides to hold up a gambling den in Harlem. Everything goes wrong, and the fellow has to go on the run, after which things just get worse and worse. This is a fairly good story that reminds me of Cornell Woolrich’s work, without being as well-written. It’s bleak as all get-out, with a relentless sense of doom that Echols captures well.

Arthur J. Burks was another very prolific pulpster who wrote just about every genre except Westerns. “The Gun” in this issue is a short story about a hitman. It’s well-written, effective, but doesn’t end quite as dramatically as it might have. This may be the first thing I’ve read by Burks, and it wouldn’t excite me about reading more by him, but his work has a pretty good reputation and I’m sure I’ll try something else by him.

The issue wraps up with “The Crimson Blade” by “John L. Benton”, a well-known Thrilling Group house-name, so there’s no telling who actually wrote it. A scene in the story matches the cover illustration, which makes me think the painting came first and one of the regular authors wrote the story to match. In this one, a cop investigates the murder of a society doctor who’s rumored to be pushing dope to wealthy women. It appears that a low-class junkie killed the doctor, but the cop believes the guy was framed and sets out to prove it. This is a solid little yarn that’s well-written. The plot might have been better with another twist or two, but it works okay.

Overall, I can’t really recommend this issue. I found a couple of the stories almost unreadable, and the best ones were no more than okay. Maybe this isn’t a fair comparison, but the same month this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE was on the stands, BLACK MASK featured stories by Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel (a Donahue story), Raoul Whitfield, Roger Torrey, Norvell Page, and Donald Barr Chidsey, while DIME DETECTIVE had stories by T.T. Flynn, Frederick Nebel (a Cardigan story), Leslie T. White, and John Lawrence. Next time I’m in the mood for a detective pulp, I’ll probably go for one of those titles.

Classic Hardboiled Pulp: Dead Evidence: The Complete BLACK MASK Cases of Harrigan - Ed Lybeck

Ed Lybeck’s name was vaguely familiar to me, and when I read Will Murray’s excellent introduction to this collection of Lybeck’s stories published in BLACK MASK, I realized why: Joseph T. Shaw included one of Lybeck’s stories in the iconic anthology THE HARD-BOILED OMNIBUS, which I read about fifty years ago. I have no memory of Lybeck’s story in that book, however, and after rereading it in this one, I still have no memory of it from back then. Which proves nothing except that I didn’t always recognize greatness when I came across it, because these yarns are absolutely fantastic.

Lybeck had only four stories published in BLACK MASK, all of them novella or novelette length, and they all feature the same protagonist, tough guy reporter Francis St. Xavier Harrigan, who covers the crime beat for the New York Leader and who, Lybeck implies, was once a crook and a gunman himself. Lybeck doesn’t seem sure whether abandoning gangdom for journalism is a step up or down for Harrigan.

In the first story, “Leaded Ink” (BLACK MASK, December 1931), Harrigan goes after the mobsters who murdered a young reporter who was his protégé. The second story, “Kick-Back” (January 1932) finds him clashing with a corrupt politician running on a reform ticket and the gangster backing the politician. This is the story that appeared in THE HARD-BOILED OMNIBUS. “Dead Evidence” (March 1932) is a direct sequel to “Kick-Back”, with Harrigan framed for a killing and fighting to clear his name. The final Harrigan story, “Silent Heat”, didn’t appear until February 1934. In this one, Harrigan takes on a white slavery ring.

These are all action yarns and don’t have much actual detection in them, but as fast-moving tales of crime-busting, they’re some of the best I’ve ever read. Lybeck’s style is a joy to read, a mixture of tough violence, snappy patter, and unexpectedly breezy humor. I laughed out loud a number of times reading these stories. Harrigan’s a great character, able to absorb a tremendous amount of punishment and still keep slugging away at his enemies. I probably never would have been able to read these stories if Steeger Books hadn’t reprinted them in the new Black Mask line, so I really appreciate the opportunity. Based on only four stories, you can’t put Lybeck in the same rank as Hammett, Chandler, Nebel, and the other giants from BLACK MASK, but he was mighty good anyway and I had a great time reading this collection. If you love hardboiled pulp like I do, it gets my highest recommendation.