Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, November 1936

I don’t own this pulp, but I recently read a PDF of it downloaded from the Internet Archive. The cover is by Delos Palmer.

Evidently Alan Anderson was a real guy. There’s no indication in the Fictionmags Index that it’s a house-name. He’s the author of the first story in this issue, “The Woman in Yellow”, which is about an American spy trying to retrieve an envelope full of vital military plans from a beautiful brunette while they travel on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. Our protagonist has a partner in this assignment, a beautiful blonde who’s a nightclub dancer in addition to being a spy. Naturally, seeing as this is a Spicy Pulp, both gals manage to lose some of their clothes during the course of the story. The plot is pretty interesting, with a semi-clever twist at the end, but the writing isn’t very good. It’s choppy and hard to follow in places. Not a bad effort, but not a particularly good one, either.

“Killer’s Price” is the first of three stories in this issue by my old buddy Edwin Truett Long. I refer to him as my buddy because I’m starting to feel a real kinship with the guy despite the fact that he died eight years before I was born. But he lived in the North Texas area for a good part of his life, including some time in Fort Worth. He wrote fast, in a variety of genres, and I can see myself having the same sort of career if I’d been born earlier. “Killer’s Price” is bylined Mort Lansing, one of Long’s regular pseudonyms, and it’s part of his series about private detective Mike Cockrell. As the story opens, Mike is on vacation in a coastal city pretty clearly modeled after Corpus Christi when he gets involved in the kidnapping of a millionaire’s daughter. There are a couple of other beautiful blondes mixed up in the deal, along with a villainous bartender and a gang boss. Mike is kept hopping as he tries to straighten out this mess. The story is plotted pretty loosely, but the action races along at breakneck speed and the banter is good. This one is a considerable step up from Anderson’s story.

Next up is a story by that stalwart of the Spicy Pulps, Robert Leslie Bellem, and it features his iconic private detective character Dan Turner. In “Murder for Metrovox”, a beautiful movie star takes a high dive from a high rise and winds up not so beautiful. Was her death suicide—or murder? At the same time, Dan is already mixed up in the case of a missing starlet, and there’s a beautiful stag movie actress involved as well. Naturally, Dan sorts everything out, but not before coming up with good excuses for the still-living babes to take their clothes off, and he manages to guzzle down a bottle of Vat 69 while he’s at it, too. Dan was one of the original multi-taskers. As usual with Bellem’s work, this is a well-plotted, if slightly predictable, yarn. The wackiness seems toned down a little, but it’s great fun to read anyway. I’ve never read a bad Dan Turner story.

“Traitor’s Gold” is by Hamlin Daly, which was a pseudonym for E. Hoffmann Price. Price wrote a lot for the Spicy Pulps under his own name, but Hamlin Daly shows up quite a bit, too. “Traitor’s Gold” is a nighttime romp through a spooky old mansion in the Hudson Valley that’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered millionaire who owned it. He had a beautiful daughter, too, and our detective protagonist is in love with her and determined to trap the ghost who’s causing trouble. This isn’t top of the line work from Price, but it moves right along and has a decent plot. I liked it without being overly impressed by it.

The next story in this issue is another of Edwin Truett Long’s contributions, this time writing under the name Cary Moran. “Murder in Music” features sheriff’s department investigator Jarnegan, who only investigates murders. I read this one several years ago in a Black Dog Books chapbook that reprinted several of the Jarnegan stories, and here’s what I said about it then: “Murder in Music” finds Jarnegan investigating the death of a drummer from a jazz band visiting the city. It appears that the man was frightened to death by voodoo. But all is not as it appears, of course, and another band member soon turns up dead, giving Jarnegan two murders to solve.

Harley Tate and Diana Ware are partners in a private detective agency, and in “The Taveta Necklace”, they’re hired to keep a fabulously valuable necklace from being stolen during a high society party. Naturally, trouble ensues, including several murders, in this fast-paced, entertaining yarn that’s credited to George Sanders. In fact, it’s the only piece of fiction credited to Sanders in the Fictionmags Index, and there was one other Harley Tate/Diana Ware yarn published under the name Alan Anderson, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that this George Sanders was a pseudonym. Did Alan Anderson write this one, too? Now that I don’t know. I liked it considerably better and thought it was better written than Anderson’s “The Woman in Yellow”, elsewhere in this issue. This will probably have to go down as another unsolved mystery of the Spicy Pulps, though.

“Death on the Half Shell” is the third Edwin Truett Long story in this issue. It’s part of the Johnny Harding series, which, haphazardly enough, was published under three different pseudonyms during its run: Cary Moran, Mort Lansing, and Carl Moore, the byline on this particular story. Johnny Harding is a feisty little gossip columnist who frequently stumbles over dead bodies. He’s the protagonist of Long’s novel KILLER’S CARESS, which was published under the Cary Moran name. In this story, he's digging for information about a lottery that appears to be a swindle, when a beautiful informant winds up dead after consuming a poisoned lobster. More murders take place as the story gallops through a night of action. I enjoyed KILLER’S CARESS, and I like this story a lot, too. They could have made a good B-movie series about Johnny Harding starring, say, Jimmy Cagney, although Cagney was too big a star by then. But he’d fit the character perfectly.

Robert A. Garron was really Howard Wandrei, so it’s not surprising that his story “The 15th Pocket” is one of the best-written stories in this issue. A police detective investigates the murder of a wealthy lingerie manufacturer whose body is found in the back seat of an empty cab stalled in traffic. The Spicy Pulps are probably the only place you’d find a character who’s a lingerie tycoon! This isn’t a particularly complicated yarn, but the plot holds together all right and it moves right along with smooth prose. Wandrei’s stories are always good.

With stories by Bellem, Price, Long, and Wandrei, you’d expect this issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES to be a good one, and so it is. I really enjoyed it. Sure, the stories are a little formulaic, but so is most fiction, not just pulp. Space them out a little and they read just fine. If you’ve never read a Spicy Pulp, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: No Wings on a Cop - Cleve F. Adams (and Robert Leslie Bellem)

Like SHADY LADY and CONTRABAND, NO WINGS ON A COP is another novel published under Cleve F. Adams’s name that was actually expanded by Robert Leslie Bellem from an Adams pulp story into a novel. Bellem and Adams were good friends, and I seem to recall reading that Bellem wrote those novels as a favor to Adams’s widow. Of course, I imagine Bellem got a cut of the money, too. If I’m wrong about any of that, I hope someone who knows more about the situation will correct me. Also, I’m not sure which Adams story served as the basis for this book. It might be “Clean Sweep”, from the August 24, 1940 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, which, according to the Fictionmags Index, features police lieutenant John J. Shannon, the hero of NO WINGS ON A COP. If anyone knows for sure, again please let us know in the comments.

With that bit of background out of the way, how is NO WINGS ON A COP as a novel? Pretty darned good, that’s what it is. When the story opens, Lt. Shannon’s boss and good friend, Captain Grady, has already been murdered, and the killing has been pinned on gambler Floyd Duquesne, who evidently had been paying off Grady for protection. Shannon doesn’t believe that his friend was crooked, of course, and sets out to find the real killer. Almost as soon as he begins his investigation, though, somebody plants a bomb in his car. Shannon survives the explosion, but his left arm is broken, so for the rest of the book he’s going around with his arm in a cast and a sling, which proves pretty inconvenient at times but ultimately comes in handy on at least one occasion.

All the action in the book takes place in less than twenty-four hours, and it’s a whirlwind pace, as you might expect. Shannon clashes with the acting chief of police (the regular chief is out of town), gets kicked off the force, gets hit on the head and knocked out, trades banter with his girlfriend, who’s a beautiful model, has a couple of shootouts with hired killers, has a beautiful redheaded stripper try to seduce him, and runs up against an assortment of crooked cops, corrupt politicians, big-time gamblers, and dangerous hoodlums. It’s all great fun, with a complex plot that Shannon finally sorts out at the end. I’ve been reading this sort of hardboiled detective novel for more than forty years now and still get a big kick out of a good one, which NO WINGS ON A COP certainly is.

Bellem’s writing is as smooth and fast and enjoyable as ever, and knowing the background of the book’s authorship gives it an added level of humor. There’s a mention of a cab driver reading an issue of the DAN TURNER, HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE comic book, some of the characters sit around and drink Vat 69, Turner’s favorite hooch, and Bellem even writes himself into the book as a character, bank officer Robert B. Leslie: “The guy was a middle-aged man with slightly wavy hair, a thickening middle and a mustache of which he seemed inordinately vain.” Although Adams might have been responsible for some of that in the original story, I don’t know. He and Bellem were friends, after all.

NO WINGS ON A COP was originally published by Handi-Books in 1950 and later reprinted by Harlequin. As far as I know, it’s been out of print for more than fifty years now, and it ought to be a prime candidate for reprinting by one of the small presses. This is one of those books that sat on my shelves for years without me getting around to reading it, then was lost in the fire. I replaced it not long ago and decided that I’d better get it read. I’m glad I did. Highly recommended.

(This post appeared originally on April 16, 2010. Since that time, NO WINGS ON A COP still hasn't been reprinted. One of these days . . .)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective, January 1943

I don’t own this issue, or, for that matter, any issues of SUPER-DETECTIVE. They’re not that easy to find, and they’re usually pretty expensive when you do come across one. But when Radio Archives recently published an e-book edition of this issue, I picked it up because I wanted to read the Jim Anthony novel in it. The by-line on that novel is John Grange, but that was a house-name, and in this case, I knew that two excellent authors collaborated on the story: Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard.

For those of you unfamiliar with Jim Anthony, here’s a little background. His father was an Irish adventurer, his mother a Comanche princess. He’s a millionaire industrialist with business interests all over the world, an amateur criminologist, a brilliant scientist, and a world-class athlete. He’s Doc Savage, Bruce Wayne, and Jim Thorpe rolled into one. Veteran pulpster Victor Rousseau wrote the first dozen Jim Anthony novels in SUPER-DETECTIVE, Edwin Truett Long did the next three, and then friends and sometime writing partners Bellem and Ballard wrote ten more novels to finish off the series. “Murder Between Shifts” in this issue is the fourth entry by Bellem and Ballard. In Rousseau’s stories, he portrayed Jim Anthony as more of a globe-trotting adventurer, the Doc Savage part of the character. I’d read that Bellem and Ballard’s novels had more of a mystery angle, concentrating on Jim Anthony’s efforts as a criminologist. I was eager to read one and find out.

“Murder Between Shifts” finds Jim visiting Los Angeles with his pilot and sidekick Tom Gentry. Jim owns an aircraft plant there that’s doing vital work for the war effort, but there are rumors of trouble he’s checking out, and sure enough, when he tracks down the plant manager to a nightclub that caters to the swing shift workers, the man is murdered right in front of Jim’s eyes by one of the other plant executives. The thing is, the guy who pulled the trigger claims he’s innocent! Jim investigates, of course, which leads to attempts on his own life along with sensuous encounters with several beautiful babes. (SUPER-DETECTIVE was published by the same company that put out the Spicy pulps, so it’s a little more risque than some, although mild by our current standards.) Even though Jim is still the same tycoon/scientist/criminologist he is in the earlier novels by Victor Rousseau, “Murder Between Shifts” does read much more like a typical hardboiled detective yarn than Rousseau’s novels do. It’s well-written, clever enough, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It also features a cameo appearance by police lieutenant Dave Donaldson, from Bellem’s Dan Turner series, which put a grin on my face.

William B. Rainey, author of the short story “Don’t Get Killed Tonight”, was really Wyatt Blassingame, best remembered probably for his Weird Menace stories although he was a prolific pulpster who wrote a little bit of everything and wrote it well. “Don’t Get Killed Tonight” is part of his series about private detective Eddie Harveth, who works as a troubleshooter for nightclub and restaurant owners in New Orleans. It’s a good story in which Eddie gets framed for the murder of a beautiful dancer and has to go on the run from the cops as he tracks down the real killer. There’s nothing unusual or special about this story, but it’s competently written and moves right along. A tad on the forgettable side, though.

Randolph Barr was a house-name, and the real author of “The Shape of Death” is unknown, which is a shame because it really is a top-notch story featuring some fine hardboiled writing. A beautiful blonde living in a Florida trailer camp finds a dead man on her doorstep. Unfortunately, he’d made a pass at her a short time earlier in a nearby tavern, and she was heard to threaten him. The cops believe he followed her back to her trailer and she killed him, possibly in self-defense. The only one who believes she’s innocent is a young reporter who falls for her. The plot of this one is pretty traditional and even predictable, but it races along with plenty of good dialogue and excellent descriptions. I liked it a lot and wish I knew who wrote it.

The other stories in this issue are all unacknowledged reprints, a practice for which the publisher was notorious, beginning with “Carte Blanche for Murder” by Travis Lee Stokes, which was published originally as “Blonde Madness” in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES under the name Arthur Humbolt, which was also a pseudonym. The real author was Robert C. Blackmon, who wrote a bunch of detective yarns for various pulps, under numerous different names. It opens with its newspaper reporter protagonist discovering the murdered body of a beautiful blonde with her arms chopped off. Naturally, this ties in with the case of another blonde who was killed and had her legs chopped off. And our hero’s girlfriend is a beautiful blonde and has a connection with one of the suspects! As you can tell, this story is lurid and over the top and you know exactly what’s going on almost right from the start, but Blackmon delivers it in such breathless, enthusiastic prose that it’s enjoyable despite that.

Norman A. Daniels is the actual author of “Murder Stays at Home”, published in this issue under the name Max Neilson. It was published originally as “Murder at Lake Iroquois” by Charles Maxwell in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES. This one finds a bunch of theater folks and artists partying at the island mansion of a wealthy producer, and of course one of them winds up dead, seemingly an open-and-shut case of a beautiful actress murdering a rival beautiful actress. That’s not how it turns out, and the murder method is actually pretty clever. Daniels was dependable and this story is good entertainment without being outstanding.

“Post Mortem” by Walton Grey was published originally in the August 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES as “Where is the Body?”, under the author’s real name, C. Samuel Campbell. It’s even more lurid and over-the-top than “Carte Blanche for Murder” as we have two police detectives running around a stereotypical old dark house complete with secret passages and a hulking monster who’s breaking people’s necks. This one is almost too silly for me to accept it, but it has its effective moments and I wound up reading the whole thing.

Looking back on the issue as a whole, it’s certainly entertaining. The Jim Anthony story and “The Shape of Death” by “Randolph Barr” are the highlights. I definitely want to read more of Bellem and Ballard’s Jim Anthony stories. Several of them, including “Murder Between Shifts”, are reprinted in SUPER-DETECTIVE JIM ANTHONY, THE COMPLETE SERIES: VOLUME 5 from Steeger Books. Not surprisingly, I’ve already ordered a copy. But if you want to sample the series, this e-book from Radio Archives isn’t a bad place to start.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Window With the Sleeping Nude - Robert Leslie Bellem

I used to own a copy of the original Handi-Books edition of this 1950 novel by the creator of the iconic Dan Turner, but it was missing some pages and so I never got around to reading it. Luckily, Pulpville Press has reprinted it in a nice-looking, affordable trade paperback edition that uses the same cover art as the original (which is pictured alongside this post). (The trade paperback is still available, as are hardcover and e-book editions.)

Bellem is a prime example of a “love him or hate him” author. I happen to love his work, and have ever since I discovered the Dan Turner stories years ago. No author has made me laugh more often. I think Bellem’s use of language is brilliant, and most of the Turner stories are very well-put-together mysteries, to boot, packing some pretty complex plots into short story and novelette lengths.

THE WINDOW WITH THE SLEEPING NUDE proves that Bellem’s writing works equally as well at novel length and in third person. This isn’t a Dan Turner yarn. The hero is store detective Barney Cunard, who’s in charge of security at the biggest department store in an unnamed town. Barney arrives at work one rainy, hungover morning to find a nude blond female mannequin on his desk. He’s barely started trying to figure out how and why it got there when something else happens that has to be connected to this mystery. The body of one of the store’s window dressers is discovered in a bed in one of the store’s window displays, dressed only in lingerie and stabbed in the heart. Obviously, the killer replaced the mannequin with the corpse and left the mannequin on Cunard’s desk for some unfathomable reason.

But this is one of those novels where very little that seems obvious turns out to be true. The plot twists and turns with dizzying speed as all the action takes place in just a few hours. In that short period of time, there are several more murders and a kidnapping. Cunard gets hit on the head and knocked out, guzzles rye, runs around in the rain, and finally figures everything out from clues that Bellem cleverly plants along the way. Of course, as a veteran of the Spicy pulps, Bellem manages to find excuses for several of his female characters to wind up in various stages of undress. This novel reads very much like it could be an expansion of one of Bellem’s hundreds of pulp stories, but I don’t know if that’s the case or not. (I still don't know, so if you do, please clue us in!) He also tuckerizes at least one obscure pulp author who must have been a friend of his, and there may be more such instances that I missed. (There's a character named George Armin, so I assume this is a tip o' the fedora to prolific pulp writer George Armin Shaftel.)

Bellem has been mentioned as a possible influence on Richard S. Prather, and there are definite similarities between Bellem’s Dan Turner and Prather’s Shell Scott. I think Prather was a slightly better writer, giving some of his novels a more serious undertone than you’ll find in Bellem’s work, but Bellem’s stuff is laugh-out-loud funny, well-plotted, and very much worth reading in my opinion. I had a great time reading THE WINDOW WITH THE SLEEPING NUDE and I suspect some of you would, too. Highly recommended. (This post was published originally in a somewhat different form on January 29, 2010.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Speed Detective, September 1943

I haven't seen too many tennis court shootouts on pulp covers. In fact, this one painted by H.J. Ward for an issue of SPEED DETECTIVE is the only one I recall. There are some familiar names inside, including Robert Leslie Bellem (twice, once as himself and once as Jerome Severs Perry, one of my favorite pseudonyms), Laurence Donovan (as Larry Dunn), house-names William Decatur and Randolph Barr, and Harold de Polo and Arthur Feldman, both real names as far as I know. There's a story by Lloyd Sanders, too, but it's his only credit in the Fictionmags Index, so he could be one of the Trojan Publications regulars. Or not. 

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: Spicy-Adventure Stories, February 1938

H.J. Ward provides another typically lurid cover on this issue of SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES. Inside are some of the usual Spicy authors: Robert Leslie Bellem (as Jerome Severs Perry), E. Hoffmann Price, Hugh B. Cave (an Eel story as Justin Case), Edwin Truett Long (as Dale Boyd and Charles Daw), and two authors not known to be house-names, Ross Flynn and Wyreck Brent. However, both guys published only a few stories and only in various Spicy pulps, so I wouldn't put too much faith in those being their real names.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, June 1943

Well, that's certainly a creepy cover. I don't know the artist, but this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE caught my eye, so he did his job. The Dr. Zeng novella by "Walt Bruce" is actually by W.T. Ballard and Robert Leslie Bellem. Also on hand in this issue are Norman A. Daniels, Dale Clark, Joe Archibald, William Morrison (really Joseph Samachson, the guy who created the Martian Manhunter for DC Comics), Lee Fredericks, and Ted Coughlan. Not an all-star line-up, maybe, but I'll bet it's a pretty entertaining issue. The Dr. Zeng story, along with the others in that series, has been reprinted by Steeger Books in the volume DR. ZENG ARCHIVES. I have a copy but have never read it. One of these days . . .

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: Private Detective Stories, June 1937

This is the first issue of PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES, from the same folks who brought us SPICY DETECTIVE, SPICY WESTERN, etc. It’s available in an e-book edition from Radio Archives, and I’ve been reading it recently, a story or two at a time between editing projects.

The headliner in this pulp, not surprisingly, is Robert Leslie Bellem’s legendary private eye character Dan Turner. The Turner yarn in this debut issue is a novelette called “Murder on the Sound Stage”, one of the longer Turner yarns I’ve read. Unfortunately, that uninspired title goes with the old plot about an actor being murdered on set when somebody fires a gun with a live round in it at the same time as a gun with a blank in it goes off. The victim had known that his life was in danger and had summoned Dan to the studio to protect him, but it was too late. The guy gets croaked right in front of Dan’s eyes . . . but not until Dan has encountered a beautiful blonde with murderous intentions of her own.

From there the action takes off hellity-blip and involves a beautiful brunette Russian babe (the dead gink’s wife) and a redhead who works as an extra in the galloping snapshots. All the ruckus takes place in the space of one night, and it’s a crowded night because Bellem crams in a lot. There are two more murders—or was it three?—and Turner gets bashed on the conk at least once before everything gets wrapped up in a fairly improbable manner.

As usual, there’s a considerable amount of enjoyment to be found in Bellem’s fast-paced prose. The guy could sling words, no doubt about that. And his plots were often complex and well-constructed. That’s not really the case here, and that’s what keeps this yarn from belonging in the top rank of Dan Turner stories. Worth reading, but a lot of them are better.

Next up is a true crime feature by C.A.M. Donne (Donald Cameron), “Vengeance of the Severed Hands”, about a husband who murders his wife and dismembers her to get rid of the body. I have no idea if it’s actually true or if Cameron, who wrote quite a bit for the Spicies, just made it all up. But it's written well enough that I didn’t skip it, which I often do with non-fiction features in pulp magazines.

“Pair of Tramps” is bylined Mort Lansing, but that’s a pseudonym for the very prolific Edwin Truett Long, who was one of Trojan Publishing’s stalwarts, writing under numerous pseudonyms and house-names. The protagonist in this one is a down-on-his-luck former private detective named Bane, who had to go on the run when he was framed for a crime by a local gambler. He’s come back to the city from which he fled to try to borrow some money from his former girlfriend, who happens to be the mistress of the gambler who framed him. That doesn’t work out, but Bane then meets a beautiful redhead, a former showgirl who happens to be up to her pretty neck in a murder case involving her husband, her rich father-in-law, and a knife in the neck.

I generally enjoy Long’s work, but “Pair of Tramps” is an excellent story, probably the best thing by him that I’ve read so far. The action never lets up, the plot is satisfyingly twisty, and the prose is top-notch, the sort of terse poetry that reminded me a great deal of Paul Cain’s work. Not as good as Cain, mind you, but almost as good as Cain is pretty darned good.

I’ve probably read some stories by Howard Wandrei writing as Robert A. Garron in various Spicy pulps, but as with Long’s story, Wandrei’s “Wrong Number” in this issue really impressed me. The tough, likable protagonist of this one, private detective Noel Athens, is hired to find the daughter of a newspaper tycoon. The girl has run off with a gangster. Yes, it’s a wandering daughter job, and the plot is pretty straightforward, but the writing is excellent, enough so that I’m going to keep my eyes open for more stories by Wandrei. (I have a couple of collections of his science fiction and fantasy stories under his own name and will get around to those eventually, I hope.)

“Nailed With Silver”, a novelette by E. Hoffmann Price, introduces Jeff Dargan, a private eye who went on to star in several more yarns published in PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES. In this one, he’s in Saint Augustine, Florida, enjoying a break after wrapping up a jewel robbery case, when he suddenly finds himself up to his neck in more trouble involving a beautiful brunette who wants Dargan to help her get some evidence for her divorce case against her husband, a sugar tycoon who owns a company based in Cuba. Well, there’s a murder, of course, along with another beautiful woman, some crooked politicians, and shoot-outs and fistfights galore. Price was another stalwart of the Spicy pulps, along with his prodigious output elsewhere, and I’ve never read a story of his that wasn’t at least enjoyable. I wasn’t sure about “Nailed With Silver” at first. The plot seemed pretty muddled. But then darned if Price didn’t pull everything together so that it made sense. I would up liking this one quite a bit.

Allan K. Echols is best remembered for his Westerns, I think, but he wrote quite a few detective yarns, too. His story “Sweet and Hot” wraps up this issue. It concerns a fixed horse race that turns out not to be fixed, a $20,000 bet, and a private detective framed for murder. While it’s not a particularly memorable story, it’s well-written and moves right along.

So, all of this plus a brutally effective cover by H.J. Ward makes this a pretty good first issue of PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES, setting it up for a nice long run. The stories by Long, Wandrei, and Price are really good, and the Bellem yarn is entertaining if not top of the line. I had a great time reading the ebook version of this memorable pulp debut.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, December 1942

There's a lot going on in this cover by Allen Anderson, including a Clark Gable lookalike who's about to get brained by a feisty redhead. Oddly enough, the cover story in this issue is by Alan Anderson, a totally different guy, as far as I know. There's also a Dan Turner story by Robert Leslie Bellem, and the rest are all retitled reprints from earlier issues of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES published under house-names. The real authors behind them include Arthur Warren and William G. Bogart. The others? Who knows? This is actually the final issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES. The next month the magazine continued under the name SPEED DETECTIVE STORIES, with (supposedly) slightly toned down content.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, November 1938

Looks like the Skipper traded Gilligan for a different little buddy. I'm talking about the monkey, of course. This is another good cover by H.J. Ward on one of the Spicy pulps. The stories inside this issue of SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES are all by stalwarts of the Spicy line: Robert Leslie Bellem, E. Hoffmann Price, Victor Rousseau (as Hugh Speer), Edwin Truett Long (as Jose Vaca), Laurence Donovan (as Larry Dunn), and Wyatt Blassingame (as William B. Rainey).

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Speed Detective, August 1945

The cover on this issue of SPEED DETECTIVE is by Gordon Samstag, who did only one other pulp cover (an issue of ADVENTURE in 1946) but was well-regarded as a painter and sculptor. I think it's a pretty good cover, even though the girl is dressed more sedately than most on the covers of pulps from Trojan Publications. Inside are stories by some top-notch writers, including a Dan Turner yarn by Robert Leslie Bellem and stories by Roger Torrey and Howard Wandrei (as Robert A. Garron), plus Rex Whitechurch and Elizabeth Starr. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, January 1936

Another great Parkhurst cover on this issue of SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES. Inside are yarns by the usual assortment of authors: Robert Leslie Bellem (as himself and Jerome Severs Perry), Victor Rousseau (as Lew Merrill and Hugh Speer), Wyatt Blassingame (as William B. Rainey), Arthur Wallace, W.W. McKenna, and two authors who have no credits in the Fictionmags Index except their stories in this issue, George Herreford and Lance LeCamp, so both of those names may well be pseudonyms.

Forgotten Books: The Sex Ladder - Anthony Gordon (Robert Leslie Bellem)

(This post originally appeared on March 6, 2007.)

Lawrence Block isn’t the only author getting his Sixties soft-core porn novels reprinted these days. I just read a brand-new Pulpville Press edition of THE SEX LADDER by Anthony Gordon, originally published by Beacon Books in 1964, just like Block’s LUCKY AT CARDS. And as in the case of Block’s pseudonym “Sheldon Lord”, “Anthony Gordon” turns out to be an author best-known for his mysteries, too – Robert Leslie Bellem, the prolific creator of private eye Dan Turner.

Unfortunately, THE SEX LADDER isn’t up to the same standards as LUCKY AT CARDS. Instead of a noirish crime novel like Block’s book, THE SEX LADDER is pretty much a run-of-the-mill, fairly sordid soap opera about a young engineer and his ambitious girlfriend, who will do just about anything to help advance his career, if you know what I mean and I think you do, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It has none of the goofy charm of the Dan Turner stories or the other mystery and weird menace stories that Bellem turned out by the hundreds for the Spicy pulps during the Thirties and Forties. Bellem was a fine wordsmith and the writing here is certainly smooth enough, reading very fast, but it doesn’t seem to me that his heart was really in this job. There was at least one other Beacon Book by “Anthony Gordon”, DOCTOR OF LESBOS. I assume that Bellem wrote it, as well. There are a few listings for it on ABE, but Pulpville Press also plans to reprint it in the future. Despite my reservations about THE SEX LADDER, I’ll probably read DOCTOR OF LESBOS, too. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

(UPDATE: No, I never got around to reading DOCTOR OF LESBOS, and I probably won't. You can still find used copies of the reprint, but even they're too pricey for me. So more than likely, I'll do without that one.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective, June 1943

This is a later issue of SUPER-DETECTIVE where Jim Anthony, star of the lead novel, is a hardboiled detective and no longer a Doc Savage-like character, and the tale was written by W.T. Ballard and Robert Leslie Bellem under the John Grange house-name. I've never read any of this version of Jim Anthony, and I really ought to. I think one or two of them have been reprinted, but I could be wrong about that. Also on hand are Harold de Polo and three more house-names, Paul Hanna, R.T. Maynard, and Walton Grey. No telling who they were. The cover is by H.J. Ward, and I like it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective, February 1950

As you probably can tell from the cover, SUPER-DETECTIVE was put out by Trojan Publications, part of the same stable as all the Spicy/Speed titles, and as a result, you get a racy cover, at least one story by Robert Leslie Bellem, and a bunch of stories by authors who are either house-names or one-shots. However, that's a good cover, and Bellem is always worth reading, and chances are that some of the other stories are worth reading, too. One oddity is that while Bellem is credited on the cover as the author of "Gambling Corpse", according to the Fictionmags Index (where this scan came from), the story is credited in the Table of Contents to Ellery Watson Calder, one of Bellem's well-known pseudonyms. It doesn't really matter either way, of course.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Mystery Stories, January 1936

This cover by H.L. Parkhurst is pretty lurid and bizarre even by Spicy pulp standards . . . but it sure catches the eye, doesn't it? Inside are stories by the usual top-notch suspects: two by Robert Leslie Bellem (as himself and as by Jerome Severs Perry), two by Edwin Truett Long (as Cary Moran and Mort Lansing), two by E. Hoffmann Price (as himself and as by Hamlin Daly), Hugh B. Cave (as Justin Case), Colby Quinn, and Charles A. Baker Jr., who may or may not have been real. It's pretty easy to see why most of the Spicy pulps were sold under the counter back in 1936, no matter how tame they may seem today.

Classic Adventure Pulp: The Spicy-Adventure Megapack - Robert Leslie Bellem, Victor Rousseau, et al.

 

I’ve been reading this big e-book anthology for the past year or so, a story or two (or three) between novels, or when I just didn’t have the attention span for anything longer, an all too common condition these days. I’ve also discovered that they’re also great to read while sitting and waiting at the doctor’s office, fast-paced and always interesting. The contents are as follows, all of them originally published in SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES, with a few exceptions as noted.

THE SHANGHAI JESTER, by Robert Leslie Bellem (July 1934)

BLACK MURDER, by Carl Moore (Edwin Truett Long) (April 1935)

SUEZ SOUVENIR, by Jerome Hyams (Robert Leslie Bellem) (SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES, September 1934)

THE HOUSE OF WEIRD SLEEP, by Charles R. Allen (January 1935)

CAVE OF THE CRISS-CROSS KNIVES, by C.C. Spruce (April 1935)

HOT BLOOD, by Arthur Wallace (April 1935)

THE MOON GOD TAKES, by Robert Leslie Bellem (SPICY MYSTERY STORIES, December 1936)

SMUGGLER’S ISLAND, by Atwater Culpepper (April 1935)

TALISMAN OF DOOM, by James W. Marvin (Robert Leslie Bellem) (April 1935)

TATTOOED BLONDE, by Ellery Watson Calder (Robert Leslie Bellem) (April 1935)

WHITE MEAT, by Don King (Gunard Hjertstedt, better known as Day Keene) (April 1934)

RED BAMBOO, by Jason Lyttell (SPICY MYSTERY STORIES, June 1935; apparently Lyttell’s only published story)

THE BLACK 13, by Ellery Watson Calder (Robert Leslie Bellem) (August 1935)

THE ISLE OF MONSTERS, by Jane Thomas (August 1935)

TUFFY AND HIS HAREM, by Nick Anderson (August 1935; the second of only two stories by Anderson)

QUEEN OF THE FLAMING ARROWS, by Frank E. Marks (September 1936)

VALLEY OF BLOOD, by Lew Merrill (Victor Rousseau) (September 1936)

LUST TO KILL, by Jose Vaca (Edwin Truett Long) (March 1937)

MARRIAGE FOR MURDER, by C.A.M. Donne (Donald Clough Cameron) (March 1937)

MESSAGE TO MORGAN, by Guy Russell (March 1937)

RIVER OF FIRE, by Ken Cooper (March 1937)

SKY GODDESS, by Clive Trent (Victor Rousseau) (March 1937)

LEAF OF THE LOTUS, by Guy Russell (May 1937)

THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER, by Clark Nelson (house name) (December 1939)

ADVENTURE'S END, by Robert Leslie Bellem (April 1935)

As you might expect, these stories tend to run together after a while, which is why you need to space them out. Also as you might expect, they’re all lurid, over the top, and very politically incorrect. But they’re full of action and enormous fun to read, at least for me. The Spicy level is really pretty tame. Girls tend to lose their clothes fairly often, leading to frequent flowery descriptions of their anatomy, but that’s about it. The stories all fade to black before anything actually happens.

With seven stories, more than a fourth of the total, Robert Leslie Bellem dominates the table of contents, which comes as no surprise. And every one of Bellem’s stories is good, with “Talisman of Doom”, a World War I espionage yarn under the name James W. Marvin, standing out in my memory. For sheer luridness, it would be hard to top “White Meat” by Day Keene (I’m going to call him that since that’s the name he’s best known by) and “River of Fire” by Ken Cooper. I didn’t know Keene had written for the Spicy Pulps, but I’m not surprised. I don’t know anything about Cooper except that he was fairly prolific, although nowhere near Bellem-level.

Honestly, some modern readers are going to find these stories offensive. There’s little characterization, and the plots are rushed and don’t always make sense. But I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and it’s going on my list of top ten favorite books I read this year. I’m just a little sad that I finished it and don’t have more of them to read when I don’t feel like tackling anything else.

But wait. What’s this I see on my Kindle? THE E. HOFFMANN PRICE SPICY ADVENTURE MEGAPACK, you say? Fourteen stories by another of the prolific contributors to the Spicy Pulps who doesn’t have any stories in the collection I just finished? Well, all right. I know what I’ll be reading between books and in doctor’s offices for a while.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, January 1937

A lurid but eye-catching cover by H.J. Ward on this issue of SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES. This one has a particularly good line-up of authors inside: Robert E. Howard (writing as Sam Walser) with one of his Wild Bill Clanton stories, Robert Leslie Bellem (of course) as both himself and Ellery W. Calder, Hugh B. Cave as Justin Case, Victor Rousseau as Lew Merrill, Edwin Truett Long as Clint Morgan, and a couple of authors writing under (apparently) their real names, Alan Anderson and Carson West. I love all the Spicy pulps, although they're best in small doses. I can read two or three stories in a row and still find them very enjoyable.