Herbert Morton Stoops painted all different sorts of covers for BLUE BOOK, including action-packed scenes like this one. While some are better than others, of course, he was a great cover artist and I've never seen one I didn't like. The fiction in BLUE BOOK was just as consistent as the covers. Of course, it helps when you have three stories by H. Bedford-Jones in an issue. In this case, there's one under his own name, one with his fictional collaborator Captain L.B. Williams, and one as Gordon Keyne. Also on hand are adventure pulp stalwarts Fulton Grant, Leland Jamieson, Warren Hastings Miller, William J. Makin (with a Red Wolf of Arabia story), William L. Chester (with an installment of a Kioga serial), and lesser-known writers Carl Cole and C.M. Chapin. This is the only story by Carl Cole listed in the Fictionmags Index. Who knows, maybe he was H. Bedford-Jones, too. You can't rule it out.
I had to look at this BLUE BOOK cover by the great Herbert Morton Stoops for a while before I figured out what was going on, because at first I thought the guy in the center at the bottom of the picture, in the middle of all these knights in armor, was firing a flintlock rifle. Well, that could make for an interesting story, I figured. But then I realized it's actually a crossbow he's shooting. Still a fine cover. And inside is the usual outstanding line-up of authors, including BLUE BOOK stalwarts H. Bedford-Jones (with a story in his Arms and Men series . . . and hey, it's called "The Conquering Crossbow" . . . well, that explains everything), William J. Makin with a Red Wolf of Arabia story, and Robert R. Mill with the first story in his Shock Troops of Justice series (I have the reprints of both those series published by Black Dog Books but haven't read them yet). Also on hand are the classic Western author Willliam MacLeod Raine, Leland Jamieson, William J. Makin again with his other series featuring gypsy sleuth Isaac Heron, Sidney Herschell Small, and William L. Chester with an installment of a Kioga of the Wilderness serial. That's a really impressive issue.
Yep, that's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg his own self appearing in a pulp magazine. Of course, BLUE BOOK wasn't really a typical pulp magazine, and not only because it reprinted a number of Sandburg's poems. This looks like a fine issue with an Arms and Men story by H. Bedford-Jones, part of a Kioga serial by William L. Chester, a Tiny David story by Robert R. Mill, and other stories by Leland Jamieson, Fulton Grant, Richard Howells Watkins, James Francis Dwyer, and others. It's generally hard to beat the line-up of authors in any issue of BLUE BOOK, and that's certainly true here. Plus a good Foreign Legion cover by Herbert Morton Stoops, who provided top-notch covers month after month.
