This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my
somewhat tattered copy in the scan. You don’t hear much about ADVENTURE from
this era. The magazine was far past its glory days of the Teens, Twenties, and
Thirties, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still entertaining. We'll find out. The cover on this
issue is by Murray Hirsch, an artist I’m not familiar with. The editor at this
point is veteran pulpster Ejler Jakobsson.
The issue leads off with “Son of the Sword”, a historical adventure novelette
by Poul Anderson. This may well be the first thing I’ve read by Anderson that
wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, but I know he did a number of historical
adventure novels and stories. In this one, set in ancient Egypt, a pirate from
Crete is hired to get King Tut’s beautiful young widow out of Thebes before
political enemies of hers who have seized power have her killed. The opening of
this story reminded me a little of Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black
Circle”. Thoas the pirate has some definite similarities to Conan, as well.
However, the story’s plot is very much a straight line, without any of the
twists and double-crosses that Howard would have included, and the action
scenes, while good, don’t rise to REH levels. That said, I don’t want to
criticize this story for what it isn’t, since it’s well-written, does a great
job with the setting, and races right along at a nice pace. It’s a very good
story that I enjoyed quite a bit. It certainly made me want to read more of
Anderson’s historical fiction.
Charles J. Boyle was a baseball journalist who wrote seven stories for
ADVENTURE, ARGOSY, and THE SATURDAY EVENING POST in the late Forties and early
Fifties. I don’t think I’d ever encountered his work until I read his story in
this issue, “Blood Sky”. It’s about McGafferty, a troubleshooter who
specializes in disasters such as avalanches, mine cave-ins, floods, and forest
fires. In this one, it’s a forest fire that’s threatening a small town. Boyle
uses a couple of flashbacks to give this story a bit of an epic feel and to
flesh out the romance between McGafferty and a beautiful female reporter who’s
written some unsympathetic stories about him. This is a great yarn. There’s
enough material here for a full-length novel, and it would have made a
wonderful movie directed by Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne and Barbara
Stanwyck, with a screenplay by Jules Furthman. I need to see if I can find some
more stories by Charles J. Boyle.
“Hark, Africa!”, a reprint from the September 1937 issue of ADVENTURE, is a
novelette by veteran adventure, mystery, and aviation pulpster Joel Townsley
Rogers. I think it’s about the clash between a French colonial official and the
German who ran the colony before World War I over a native dancer. I say I
think because I read five or six pages of this one and gave up on it.
Long-winded, very repetitive, and just not to my taste at all. I’ve read other
stories by Rogers that I enjoyed, but this isn’t one of them.
“No Man’s Passage” is a short story by an author I’m not familiar with, Steve Hail.
That’s a good name for a pulp writer, and evidently his own. He wrote more than
sixty adventure, Western, and sports stories for a variety of pulps and slicks
between the mid-Forties and the late Fifties. I learned something from this
story, which seems to be set in the Pacific Northwest. There were lightships,
like floating lighthouses, that protected shipping from rough coastlines. This
story is set on one and uses the old plot about the clash between a crusty old
captain and a by-the-book young officer. Naturally, there’s a bad storm and a
looming disaster as well. It’s an okay yarn, the kind of thing I like, but the
writing never really grabbed me. I finished it with no problem, though, unlike
the Rogers story.
I’ve seen Verne Athanas’s name on plenty of pulp TOCs. He wrote dozens of
stories for various markets between the late Forties and the early Sixties, as
well as a handful of Western novels. There’s even a collection of his pulp
Western yarns, PURSUIT, still available on Amazon. I don’t recall ever reading
anything by him before, though. His story “Killer’s Dark” rounds out this
issue. It’s a Western about a bank-robbing outlaw on the run from a lawman with
a personal score to settle with him. It’s well-written and moved along nicely,
but then the ending made me say, “That’s it?” Not a bad story, but it definitely
left me feeling it was a little lacking.
There are also poems by C. Wiles Hallock and John Bunker. I’m not a poetry guy,
but I read them and they’re okay.
Which is a good overall rating for this issue, I think: just okay. A very good story
by Poul Anderson, a great one by Charles J. Boyle, and then the rest of the contents
pretty forgettable. I worry sometimes that I’m too inclined to like pulp
stories just because they’re, well, pulp, and that I’m too inclined to dislike
current fiction because it doesn’t match up to the old days. But then a pulp
issue like this makes me think that might not be the case. Either way, all I
can do is try to be objective and move on.
