A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Ringmaster of Doom - Brant House (G.T. Fleming-Roberts) (Secret Agent X, November 1935)

When you saw the title RINGMASTER OF DOOM and the by-line Brant House, you probably thought, “Hey, a Secret Agent X novel about the circus!” I know that’s the first thing that went through my mind. Well, as it turns out, this is a Secret Agent X novel, all right, from the November 1935 issue of the pulp magazine of the same name, but there’s no sign of a circus. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good pulp yarn.

This one finds New York City being terrorized by a series of robberies and kidnappings being carried out by brutal, misshapen fiends who look like Neanderthal men. (And speaking of Neanderthals terrorizing modern-day America, I believe there’s a Spider novel by Norvell Page that features the same sort of menace.) Naturally, Secret Agent X has to investigate, and he starts at a fabulous society party being hosted by one of the rich men targeted for kidnapping. While he’s there he has his first violent encounter with one of the beast-men and also runs into a beautiful, redheaded, evil female spy he first crossed swords with during the Great War. From there it’s one breathless adventure after another as the Agent battles the schemes of the mysterious mastermind who calls himself Thoth, after the Egyptian god of the dead, and even wears an ibis-headed mask to make himself look like Thoth.

You know by now whether or not you love this stuff or think it’s just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of. And you know which camp I fall into. You’ve got your Neanderthals serving as henchmen for a criminal genius. You’ve got said criminal genius lashing his prisoners with an electric whip. You’ve got Secret Agent X escaping death-trap after death-trap by the skin of his teeth. And finally you’ve got a battle royal in a network of abandoned sewers along the East River that’s being flooded. There’s not much time to take a breath in this one, and that’s good, of course, because it is wildly, unabashedly, and wonderfully goofy.

But no circus. That setting was a staple of pulp yarns. I don’t know if any of the Secret Agent X novels takes place in a circus, but it would have been a good setting for the Agent to have an adventure. As it is, RINGMASTER OF DOOM is a lot of fun.

(This post originally appeared on August 6, 2010. Since then, this novel has been reprinted in Volume 5 of SECRET AGENT "X": THE COMPLETE SERIES, published by Altus Press. It's still available in a handsome trade paperback edition from Amazon.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, May 1941

Of course it's a clown causing trouble on the cover of this issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES. You can't trust those guys! Or maybe he's actually the hero, although I wouldn't bet on that. But you can bet that any cover by Norman Saunders will be dramatic and/or action-packed, and this one certainly is. You've got knives, bullets, and blackjacks! (Hmm, "Knives, Bullets, and Blackjacks!" That wouldn't be a bad title.) Anyway, I don't own this issue, but I'm sure that inside its pages, a reader could find plenty of action. Authors include Emile C. Tepperman (twice, with a Marty Quade story under his own name and a story as by Anthony Clemens), Harold Q. Masur (also twice, once as himself and once as Hal Quincy), G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Cyril Plunkett, Joe Archibald, and several authors unfamiliar to me, James A. Kirch, Arthur T. Harris, Clark Frost, and H.F. Sorensen. I really should have read more from TEN DETECTIVE ACES over the years. It looks like a really good detective pulp.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Kingdom of Blue Corpses - Brant House (?)

“Kingdom of Blue Corpses”, from the December 1935 issue of the pulp SECRET AGENT X, is one of the more oddball entries in the series. It’s very comic-booky (if that’s a word), with a master villain who calls himself the Blue Streak and wears a blue rubber suit, somewhat like a frogman’s outfit, emblazoned with a lightning bolt. His minions – every self-respecting master villain has to have minions, of course – wear black rubber suits that look even more like frogmen and drive around in a sinister black hearse. The Blue Streak’s weapon in his campaign of terror is an electrical cannon that fires lightning bolts, and as a side effect, the corpses of the people struck by it turn bright blue. No explanation is forthcoming for this side effect, but that’s all right. This yarn isn’t very rigorously plotted, even by pulp standards.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun, as Secret Agent X tries to bring the Blue Streak to justice in a series of extremely fast-moving, action-packed confrontations. As usual, “X” employs several different disguises, and his girlfriend/assistant, beautiful blond reporter Betty Dale, even gets in on the act this time, as “X” disguises her so she can take the place of a young woman he suspects of being involved with the Blue Streak.

The actual identity of the author behind the “Brant House” house-name on this one hasn’t been established, as far as I know. The first part of the story reads like it could be by Paul Chadwick, the creator of the Secret Agent X character and the principal author in the series in its early years. The style changes somewhat during the course of the story, becoming more terse and action-oriented, which has led some readers to speculate that maybe Chadwick started the novel and from some unknown reason, another author finished it. This seems possible to me as well, but at this point, we just don’t know. Whoever wrote “Kingdom of Blue Corpses” did a good job of keeping things moving, even if they don’t always make complete sense.

(Since this post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 28, 2010, "Kingdom of Blue Corpses" has been reprinted twice, once by Adventure House and once by Altus Press. The Altus Press edition includes several other Secret Agent X novels. In the comments on the original post, there was some discussion about who actually wrote this one. Some pulp scholars lean toward G.T. Fleming-Roberts, while others think it might be the work of Paul Chadwick. Based on my reading of the story at the time, I even suggested that Chadwick may have started it and Fleming-Roberts completed it. I honestly don't know the answer, but you pays your money and you takes your choice!)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1940

There may not be any Space Babes of the sort he's known for on this THRILLING WONDER STORIES cover by Earle Bergey, but it's pretty eye-catching anyway. And the lineup of authors inside is more than enough to spark the interest of a science fiction fan: Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Cummings, Sam Merwin Jr., G.T. Fleming-Roberts, and Gordon Giles (Otto Binder). Those guys were dependably entertaining pulpsters. If you want to check out their work, this issue and many other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES are available here. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crack Detective Stories, March 1944

I'm always a sucker for a good-looking redhead, especially one with a gat like the dame on this issue of CRACK DETECTIVE STORIES. I don't know who did the art. There are some mighty good authors inside this issue, too, including Bruno Fischer (as Russell Gray), T.W. Ford, Robert Turner, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Robert C. Blackmon, Tom Thursday, and Henry Morton. I don't own this issue and haven't read it, but it's probably another example of editor Robert W. Lowndes providing a quality product on a low budget.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Secret Agent X: Faceless Fury - Brant House (G.T. Fleming-Roberts)

I’ve been in a pulpish mood lately, and one of the things I’ve read is the Secret Agent X novel FACELESS FURY, from the April 1936 issue of the Secret Agent X pulp.

This series ran for 41 issues, and I’ve probably read more than half the novels. One of the consistent problems with Secret Agent X is that, as you might guess from his name, he’s pretty much of a cipher. We never learn his real name or much about his background. We don’t even know what he really looks like because he’s always in disguise. He could be anybody. And yet the novels are usually entertaining because of the bizarre plots and fast pacing.

In FACELESS FURY, which was written by G.T. Fleming-Roberts under the house-name Brant House, the bizarre elements are certainly in place. You’ve got a criminal mastermind with his head completely covered in bandages except for the eyes, which, oh by the way, shoot out an acid so powerful that it’ll completely eat away a man’s face in seconds; you’ve got a similarly bandaged amnesia victim in a sanitarium who may or may not be the mastermind; and you’ve got multiple murder victims found clutching children’s toy blocks in their hands. Not to mention forgers, gentleman jewel thieves, dope fiends, and beautiful actresses with sinister secrets. For a while this seems like a kitchen sink novel, with Fleming-Roberts throwing in every wild thing he can think of whether it makes any sense or not, but by the end of the novel he succeeds it tying it all together fairly neatly. It’s very easy to figure out who the killer really is, but you don’t read this kind of story for the mystery angle, anyway. At least I don’t.

Although Fleming-Roberts didn’t create the Secret Agent X character, he wrote more of the novels than anyone else and is considered by some pulp fans to be the series’ best author. I sort of prefer the stories by Paul Chadwick, the creator of the character, but I like Fleming-Roberts’ work, too, and FACELESS FURY is one of his best entries, well worth checking out if you’re a fan of the hero pulps. Not a bad place to start if you’re a pulp fan and have never read a Secret Agent X novel, either.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on December 18, 2007. Altus Press has reprinted the entire Secret Agent X series in a series of beautiful trade paperback volumes. "Faceless Fury" is available on Amazon in Volume 6 of that series.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top-Notch Detective, September 1938

TOP-NOTCH DETECTIVE lasted for only three issues, of which this is the first one. That cover has enough going on that I thought at first it might be by Norman Saunders, but it's actually by J.W. Scott. The fact that this pulp didn't last long couldn't be due to the quality of the authors in its pages. This issue features stories by Cleve F. Adams, Arthur J. Burks, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Edward Ronns (Edward S. Aarons), Norman A. Daniels, Henry Treat Sperry, and Orlando Rigoni, as well as a number of other, lesser-known authors. That's a pretty strong lineup and an indication of a pulp worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask Detective Magazine, July 1951

This is the very last issue of BLACK MASK in its original run and features an eye-catching cover by Harry Barton. It's hard to go wrong with a sexy redhead, at least as far as pulp covers go. I've read enough noir novels to know there are a lot of ways you can go wrong with a sexy redhead in real life. There are only two original stories in this issue, a novelette by G.T. Fleming-Roberts and a short story by Robert C. Dennis. There are four reprints: a Harley Quin story by Agatha Christie (Christie's only appearance in BLACK MASK? I don't know, but it seems likely she wasn't a regular), a Flashgun Casey story by George Harmon Coxe, a Daffy Dill story by Richard Sale, and a non-series yarn by Francis K. Allan. There have been several attempts to bring back BLACK MASK since 1951, but I'm not sure I consider any of them the real deal, admirable though some of them were. If you want to check out this final issue, the whole thing is on-line and can be found here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Mystery, May 1940

Rudolph Belarski provides the eye-catching cover for this issue of THRILLING MYSTERY, and spinning the yarns inside are Robert Bloch, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Carl Jacobi, Stewart Sterling, Arthur K. Barnes, house-name Will Garth, and lesser-known pulpsters Russell Stanton and David Bernard. With covers and titles like that, it's no wonder the Weird Menace pulps sold so well for a while.

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: Mammoth Detective, September 1942

I've said it before, and it's still true: you can't trust mummies. This cover is by Ziff-Davis regular Robert Gibson Jones. I always like his covers, and this one is no exception. Inside this issue are a number of authors I also associate with Ziff-Davis: Howard Browne, William P. McGivern, Dwight V. Swain, David Wright O'Brien (as himself and as John York Cabot), and house-name Alexander Blade. But there are also some authors who I don't think of as your usual Z-D authors: Robert Leslie Bellem, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, George Armin Shaftel, and Harold Channing Wire. MAMMOTH DETECTIVE lived up to its name. There are well over 300 pages in this issue.

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: Popular Detective, March 1937

Look behind you, lady! (That's actually the title of a mystery novel by A.S. Fleischman that has absolutely nothing to do with this post, but it's an exclamation that's appropriate here, too, I think.) At any rate, I like the bright colors on this cover. POPULAR DETECTIVE was no BLACK MASK or DIME DETECTIVE, but there are some very good authors in this issue, including Frank Gruber, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Lawrence Blochman, Frederick C. Painton, and Ray Cummings.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask, August 1940

BLACK MASK was past its glory days by 1940 but still producing good issues like this one, with an eye-catching Rafael DeSoto cover and some excellent authors inside: George Harmon Coxe with a Flashgun Casey story, Roger Torrey, Stewart Sterling, Wyatt Blassingame, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, and the lesser-known Eaton K. Goldthwaite. If you want to read this issue, it's available on-line.

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: 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: 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: Double-Action Gang Magazine, June 1938

I've read very little from the gang pulps. Like Weird Menace, they were a sub-genre that flourished for a while and then was gone. But they had some good covers while they lasted, and some decent writers, too, such as in this issue of DOUBLE-ACTION GANG MAGAZINE which featured stories by E. Hoffmann Price and G.T. Fleming-Roberts, as well as Anson Hard, a prolific contributor to a variety of pulps, Margie Harris, who wrote mainly for the gang and prison pulps, and house names Cliff Campbell, Mat Rand, and "Undercover" Dix (really?), plus some little-known authors who may or may not have been house-names, too. I don't know who painted this cover, but I would have had a difficult time resisting it if I'd seen it on the newsstand in 1938, and the Price story would have tempted me to buy it, as well.

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.