Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, May 1945

I've mentioned before that I never liked going to the barber shop when I was a kid. Is this a barber chair the guy is sitting in? I think it is, and that's a bottle of hair tonic he's holding. Several other bottles are visible in the background. Maybe the redheaded babe was giving him a manicure before she had to pull that gat. Anyway, I don't like barber shops, and if any of you are barbers, I'm sorry. I mean no offense. I promise you, if you'd had to cut my hair when I was a little kid, you wouldn't have liked me, either. I was a terrible customer. But to get back to the point of this post . . . I feel like I should know who painted this cover, but I don't. Sam Cherry, maybe? Inside this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE are some good authors, most notably Fredric Brown but also Sam Merwin Jr., David X. Manners, Benton Braden (twice, once as himself and under his pseudonym Walter Wilson), and house-name J.S. Endicott (probably Merwin, if I had to guess).

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery Magazine, January 1945

This issue of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE came long after its heyday as a Weird Menace pulp, but judging by the line-up of authors inside, it was still a pretty darned good detective pulp: Fredric Brown, Day Keene, William R. Cox, Robert Turner, Cyril Plunkett, Larry Sternig, and a couple I'm not familiar with, Steve Herrick and Ken Lewis. That's a pretty good cover by Gloria Stoll, too. Cox's story features his series character Tom Kincaid. He expanded some of these stories into full-length novels, but I don't know if this was one of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Startling Stories, November 1951

Not a space babe in sight, so you know this isn't an Earle Bergey cover. In fact, it's by the great Alex Schomberg, who painted some of the best rocket ships you'll ever find. This issue of STARTLING STORIES also has a very strong group of writers, with a lead novel by Eric Frank Russell and short stories by Mack Reynolds and Fredric Brown, William Morrison, and my old mentor Sam Merwin Jr. If you want to check it out, the whole issue is on-line here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, July 1944

That's certainly an eye-catching cover by Rudolph Belarski on this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE. Inside are stories by some great authors, including Fredric Brown, Leigh Brackett, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Edward S. Aarons (writing as Edward Ronns), and lesser known Robert C. Blackmon, Bill Morgan, and Edward W. Ludwig. I would have plunked down a dime for this one back in 1944.

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: Mystery Book Magazine, Fall 1948

I don't care much for falling covers. They give me the creeps. But I'll admit, this one by Rudolph Belarski is pretty effective. And there's an excellent group of writers in this issue of MYSTERY BOOK MAGAZINE, too: Fredric Brown, Patrick Quentin, Helen Reilly, Norman A. Daniels, Robert C. Dennis, and house-name Robert Wallace, who, if I had to guess, in this instance was probably Daniels, as well.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, June 1944

You know me. Any cover with a sexy redhead on it is going to catch my interest. But in addition, this issue of DETECTIVE TALES features stories by Ray Bradbury, Frederick C. Davis, and Fredric Brown. That's a pretty potent trio of authors! Also on hand are Donald G. Carmack, Francis K. Allan, and a few lesser-known authors. The cover would have made me pick this one up. Bradbury, Davis, and Brown would have made me plunk down my dime.

UPDATE: The cover art is by Gloria Stoll.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Yarns, February 1939

The Weird Menace boom of the mid-Thirties hadn't gone away completely by 1939, as the cover of this issue of DETECTIVE YARNS proves. Definitely some Weird Menace influence in this cover. I don't know the artist. The stories inside sound more like typical hardboiled detective pulp. The best-known authors are Fredric Brown, Carl Rathjen, and Armand Brigaud, backed up by lesser-known authors and house-names.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top Detective Annual, 1952

That line "The Year's Best Mystery Story Anthology" makes it sound like the stories in this pulp are the best (in the editor's judgment) published in the past year, right? Well, you'd be wrong if you thought that. This is actually just a regular reprint pulp, with stories that go back to 1934 in their original appearances. Most are from various Thrilling Group pulps published during the Forties. But I'm willing to overlook that bit of hyperbole when you get a good Sam Cherry cover, along with writers such as Fredric Brown, William Campbell Gault, Murray Leinster, Stewart Sterling, Wyatt Blassingame, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Dwight V. Babcock, Ray Cummings, and Joe Archibald. The stories may be reprints, but if you haven't read them before, they're new. And those are some good authors. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super Science Stories, November 1949

This issue of SUPER SCIENCE STORIES has a good cover by Lawrence Sterne Stevens. Not one of my absolute best, maybe (in my opinion), but still eye-catching enough that I would have picked up this issue at the newsstand. And once it was in my hands, the lineup of authors inside would have been enough to get me to plunk down my hard-earned pazoors: Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, John D. MacDonald (twice, once as himself and once as John Wade Farrell), Murray Leinster, Frank Belknap Long, Margaret St. Clair, and Neil R. Jones with a Professor Jameson story. That's a lot of heavyweight talent. 

Forgotten Books: Madball - Fredric Brown

I have a fondness for novels and stories set in carnivals, circuses, and such traveling shows. Fredric Brown’s novel MADBALL, published originally in 1953 when his career was going along very well, fits quite nicely in this tradition. But as you’d expect, Brown throws a lot of curves into his tale, so you really don’t know what to expect.

Original Dell Edition

In a way, MADBALL is also a caper novel, since the plot revolves around a bank robbery, but unlike most caper novels, the job has already taken place when the book opens. In fact, it occurred weeks earlier, when two guys from a traveling carnival rob a bank in one of the towns on the show’s circuit. They hide the loot somewhere among the various attractions, then promptly get involved in a car wreck that kills one of the thieves and causes the other one to be laid up for six weeks. But as soon as the survivor gets out of the hospital, he heads for the carnival to retrieve the stolen money. Unfortunately for him, he’s murdered almost as soon as he gets there (not a spoiler, this happens very early on), and the rest of the book consists of various parties searching for the loot, as well as the murderer (who is known to the reader almost from the start) trying to cover his tracks.

Gold Medal Reprint Edition

As usual with a Fredric Brown novel, the plot is suitably twisty, but the real appeal is in the fine writing and the compelling characters he creates. Brown was a carny himself at one time, and he knew this world very well, so we get a lot of carnival lore as well a shrewd fortune teller, an insanely jealous knife-thrower and his beautiful wife, assorted women of dubious virtue, a mentally challenged young man and various people who take advantage of him and try to use him for their own benefit, and a murderer who’s maybe not as clever as he thinks he is. Brown generates plenty of suspense as we read on to find out who’s going to get away their crimes and who’s going to wind up with the loot. But of course he has a few twists he waits until the end to spring . . .

Madball is another name for the crystal ball used by the fortune teller, and maybe it actually does predict the future. I can predict that a lot of you would enjoy the novel MADBALL. It’s about to be reprinted by Stark House in its Black Gat line, and I give it a high recommendation.

Forgotten Books: The Office - Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown is best known for his science fiction and mysteries, of course, but he also wrote one mainstream novel, and it’s now available in a 60^th anniversary edition that came out late last year. THE OFFICE, published originally by Dutton in 1958, has some autobiographical overtones—the office boy narrator is named Fred Brown—but as Jack Seabrook points in his afterword to this edition, the novel is almost completely fictional. It’s the story of the eight people who work in the office of an industrial jobber in Cincinnati, a company that sells supplies to machine tool manufacturers. That’s it as far as the plot goes, just the stories of these everyday people and what happens to them over the course of two years in the 1920s.

THE OFFICE is a very old-fashioned novel and reads at times like it was written in the Twenties instead of taking place then. The narrator is very omniscient, taking part in some scenes but knowing everything there is to know about others that take place when he’s nowhere around. The pace is very slow, the plotting mundane (except where it takes a couple of lurid turns late in the book), and Brown doesn’t just break the rule about showing and not telling, he demolishes it. This book is all about telling and revels in it.

The thing is . . . man, he had me turning the pages. After the leisurely build-up, I raced through the second half of this book, compelled to find out what was going to happen. I credit Brown’s skill in creating these characters for that. Yes, there’s not much that’s out of the ordinary about them, but he does a masterful job of showing that every ordinary life is filled with its own drama and suspense. And in showing that, he creates some very poignant scenes.

You know me, I love action. What little there is in THE OFFICE takes place off-screen. Doesn’t matter. I thoroughly enjoyed this book anyway. It was a labor of love for Brown, who worked on it for years in between writing other things. It was also, not surprisingly, his least successful book as far as sales. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best book I’ve read in a while, and I give a very high recommendation.

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.

Forgotten Books: Oh, For the Life of an Author's Wife - Elizabeth Charlier Brown

I’ve mentioned before that I like to read books about writers. Here’s one that’s a little bit different. OH, FOR THE LIFE OF AN AUTHOR’S WIFE is by Elizabeth Charlier Brown, Fredric Brown’s second wife who was married to him from 1948 until his death in 1972, during the most successful part of his career.

Elizabeth, or Bethie, as Fred called her, wrote this book in 1958, but it’s gone unpublished until now. It’s a fine memoir. Elizabeth Brown wrote and sold a few stories to the love pulps in the early Fifties, so she wasn’t exactly an amateur writer, but this book does have a charmingly unpolished air about it, more like you’re sitting with her and she’s telling you the stories in person. She writes quite a bit about the domestic side of the life she shared with Fredric Brown, the moving from state to state (Fred Brown was a very restless person and never liked to stay in one place for too long), the houses where they lived, the friends they made, the parties they attended, etc. But for those of us more interested in the writing side of things, she also goes into detail about what Fred was working on when, how some of the books came about, how his famous habit of taking long bus trips to work out his plots originated, even how much money he was paid for his books and stories. I’m often surprised by how little money was made by writers I’ve thought of as having long, successful careers. The Browns, for example, sometimes had to borrow money just to pay bills.

There are also numerous passages about other writers the Browns met and befriended, including a mention of Sam Merwin Jr., my old mentor from the MSMM days. It’s all fascinating stuff, and I had a hard time putting the book down because it seemed like there was always another nugget about the world of mystery and science fiction publishing in the 1950s just waiting to be discovered in its pages.

I’ll admit, I’m woefully under-read when it comes to Fredric Brown. I’ve read two or three novels and a handful of his short stories, but I’ve enjoyed them all and really need to read more by him. This volume may prompt me to do just that. I really enjoyed it, and if you’re a Fredric Brown fan or just someone who likes reading about authors, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery Magazine, January 1943

This issue was published after DIME MYSTERY's Weird Menace phase, but the magazine still featured some pretty creepy covers, including this one. The main appeal for me, however, is that gorgeous redhead. And of course, stories by Day Keene, Fredric Brown, Frederick C. Davis, and Robert Turner. None of whom, I imagine, are as good-looking as that redhead . . . but I digress.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, October 1943

With a cover as lurid as this one by George Rozen, shouldn't the stories in this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE have titles with a little more, I don't know, pizzazz than "Death Drives a Bus" and "Murder Sets the Stage"? The titles of the other stories aren't much snappier: "Eye-Witness Testimony", "The Motive Goes Round and Round", "A Toast to Victory". "Murder Meat" and "Ashes of Hate" are a little better, but not much. The authors are pretty solid, though: Fredric Brown, W.T. Ballard, Norman A. Daniels, and James P. Webb, among others.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: New Detective, July 1949

Not a bad cover on this issue of NEW DETECTIVE, but look at that line-up of writers inside: John D. MacDonald, Day Keene, Fredric Brown, William Campbell Gault, J.L. Bouma, and Joel Townsley Rogers. Those are some heavyweight pulpsters who also had successful careers as hardback and paperback novelists.