This issue of TOP-NOTCH has a good cover by John Coughlin, an artist I associate more with DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, whether that impression is correct or not. The lead novella is by an author whose name wasn't familiar to me, R.E. Dupuy. But a little investigation revealed a pretty interesting story. Richard Ernest Dupuy was a newspaper reporter who served as an artilleryman in World War I, then stayed in the army and made a career out of it. But he had sold a few pulp stories before the war and took it up again in the late Twenties, placing a story in WEIRD TALES but concentrating on war and adventure yarns for various pulps. That came to an end when World War II began and Dupuy became the Director of Public Information at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, where he reported directly to General Eisenhower. It was Dupuy who announced to the world via radio when the invasion of Normandy began on D-Day. Pretty good for an old pulpster. After the war, Dupuy retired as a colonel and wrote military history books. I've never read anything by him, as far as I recall. There are only three other pieces of fiction in this issue of TOP-NOTCH, all of them by authors who wrote a lot of Westerns: Galen C. Colin, J. Allan Dunn, and Walker A. Tompkins, who has one of his Ozar the Aztec/Lost Race novelettes in this issue under the house-name Valentine Wood. Dunn, of course, wrote a lot of other genres besides Westerns, but he was a stalwart in that field. Quite a few issues of TOP-NOTCH can be found on-line, but this doesn't appear to be one of them.
A very happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate the holiday. As always, I have a great deal to be thankful for, including all of you reading this blog. I appreciate your patience and your continued interest after all these years. That's the First December 1930 issue of TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE, by the way, and it looks like a pretty good issue with stories by Donald Bayne Hobart, John Wilstach, Ben Conlon, and a Kroom, Son of the Sea yarn by house-name Valentine Wood. (I feel confident in saying that no one else will mention Kroom, Son of the Sea to you this Thanksgiving, but feel free to bring him up around the dinner table if you want to.)
Yep, just polin' down the river on a raft with a machine gun. Think what a different book THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN might have been if Huck and Jim had had themselves a machine gun. They might have had some real adventures then. But not to get too far afield here . . . TOP-NOTCH had some good authors, as you'd expect from a Street & Smith pulp. In this issue are stories by James P. Olsen, George Allan England, house-name Valentine Wood (with a Kroom, Son of the Sea yarn), and Warren Elliott Carleton, among others. Not big names, but Olsen was always dependable no matter what the genre and quite a bit of England's work has been reprinted. Despite its name, I've never considered TOP-NOTCH to be in the upper rank of pulps, but I'm not sure why I feel that way, since I've read very little of what was published in it, mostly just the few stories that Robert E. Howard had there and the Ozar the Aztec stories written by Walker A. Tompkins under that Valentine Wood pen-name. (Speaking of that, the final Longarm novel I wrote, LONGARM AND THE BLOODY RELIC, was inspired by those Ozar stories and has a character in it, a ship's captain, named Valentine Wood. For whatever that's worth.)
