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.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, July 25, 1942

Those who have read much of my work have probably figured out that I love fights and shootouts that take place on top of moving trains. Here's a good example of such a scene, courtesy of H.W. Scott, the regular cover artist on WESTERN STORY during this era. In addition to that nice cover, there's a fine group of writers in this issue, including Walt Coburn, Ray Nafziger, Bennett Foster, and Philip Ketchum. 

Carny Girl - John Dexter

Almost everyone who wrote softcore novels for the operation set up by publisher William Hamling and agent Scott Meredith had books published under the name John Dexter at one time or another. It was a true house-name. The actual authors have been identified on some of them, but at this point we have no idea who wrote CARNY GIRL, published as part of the Pillar Books imprint in 1964.

It starts off with a nude, beautiful young woman who finds herself on a beach with amnesia. She has no idea who she is or what she’s doing there. All she knows is that she’s mortally terrified of something and has to get away. As luck would have it, a traveling carnival is stopped on a road nearby because one of the trucks has a flat tire, so, since it’s the middle of the night, our heroine is able to sneak onto the merry-go-round and hide. Of course, she’s discovered in the morning and winds up joining the carnival, working as a shill for some of the games and in the girlie show. She also falls for the handsome but down on his luck owner of the carnival and battles against an inexplicable (amnesia, remember?) nymphomania that makes her go to bed with most of the men she encounters. Eventually she comes to be haunted by the mystery of her past, especially when she finds out the authorities are looking for a girl who matches her description. And then a hurricane blows in on the Gulf Coast where the carnival is set up . . .

Like most of these books, CARNY GIRL reads quickly and is entertaining. I like carny novels in general, and this one focuses quite a bit on that colorful background, although the nymphomania is the main plot element, of course. But it’s also frustrating (also common for these books) because with that set-up and if the sex had been toned down some, this could have been an excellent hardboiled novel published by Gold Medal or as half of an Ace Double. Whoever this John Dexter was, his prose is pretty smooth and there’s some good dialogue.

But there’s no point in lamenting what might have been, and anyway, who am I to judge? The author got paid a quick thousand or twelve hundred bucks (significant money in 1964), did his job in a professional manner, and I assume was happy to cash the check. I’m sure the thought that somebody would be reviewing this novel nearly 60 years later never crossed his mind. CARNY GIRL is no lost classic, but I enjoyed reading it and for me, that counts more than anything else.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, July 20, 1940

Foreign Legion covers showed up frequently on ARGOSY and ADVENTURE, but I don't recall seeing any on DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY until I came across this issue on the Fictionmags Index. I don't know who did the cover, but I think it's a pretty good one. It illustrates a story by Robert Carse, who did plenty of good Foreign Legion stories for ARGOSY. Since ARGOSY and DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY were both published by the Frank A. Munsey Company, it's possible Carse wrote this, sent it to ARGOSY, and somebody at Munsey decided to run it in DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY because of its title. Not that it matters, but I find speculation like that interesting. Also on hand in this issue are Hugh B. Cave, Lawrence Treat, David Goodis, Edward S. Aarons (writing as Edward Ronns), and Edwin Truett Long (writing as Edwin Truett). That's a really nice group of authors, and for a change, no serials! (Serials being the bane of a collector's existence, of course, and Munsey ran a ton of them.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second March Number, 1953

Kirk Wilson did only a handful of covers for RANCH ROMANCES, but the ones he did are all excellent, like this one. This appears to be a pretty good issue as far as the authors with stories in it, too: Dean Owen, Wayne D. Overholser, Frank Castle, Robert Aldrich (not the movie director), Harrison Colt, Cy Kees, Robert Moore Williams, and Clark Gray. The others could be hit and miss, but Owen, Overholser, and Castle are enough to make an issue like this worth reading.

Men's Adventure Quarterly #5: The Dirty Mission Issue - Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, eds.

MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY moves into its second year of publication with issue #5, the Dirty Mission Issue. And I’m happy to report that this latest offering more than lives up to the very high standards set by the previous issues. The men’s adventure magazines probably published more stories about World War II than any other subject, and as you can tell from that great cover by Bruce Minney, this issue concentrates on stories about daring raids carried out by commando forces made up of criminals, prostitutes, and rugged American G.I.s.

The prototype for that plot, of course, is THE DIRTY DOZEN, the bestselling novel by E.M. Nathanson and the famous movie made from it. Or is it? Turns out the inspiration for that novel was a real-life group of commandos known as the Filthy Thirteen, and old pulpster Arch Whitehouse contributes an article about them from the October 1944 issue of the men’s magazine TRUE. That tale kicks off the line-up of stories reprinted in this issue of MAQ, the rest of which are completely fictional, by the way.

The only other author in this bunch whose by-line can be identified as his real name and not a pseudonym is Donald Honig, who has the longest story in the book with “Savage Comrades”, from the September 1969 issue of MALE. There’s been a Honig story in every issue of MAQ so far, because he was a fine writer, and he doesn’t disappoint here. In “Savage Comrades”, he comes up with a neat twist on the criminals-turned-commandos plot by making them German POWs who, because of their criminal history before the war, don’t want the Nazis to win. Along with a couple of American GIs to run the mission, they’re sent in to blow up a vital jet fuel refinery.

The term “Lace Panty Commandos” has become sort of a running joke among men’s adventure magazine fans. The story that coined the term, “The Wild Raid of Gibbon’s Lace Panty Commandos” (MAN’S BOOK, June 1963) is included here, are are “The Desperate Raid of Wilson’s Lace Panty Guerrillas” (WORLD OF MEN, March 1963), “Free the Girls of Love Captive Stalag” (MEN, December 1967), “Death Doll Platoon” (MAN’S STORY, February 1972), “The 5 Wild Missions of O’Brien’s Submarine Commandos” (STAG, November 1973), and “G.I. River Rats Who Blasted the Nazis’ Sex Circus Villa” (STAG, November 1973). That last story has a great bit of copy on its first page: “The guests were top Nazi officers—perhaps even Rommel—and the wild assassination scheme included a mute wrestler, a bear, and a team of underwater daredevils . . .” If you can read that and not want to read the story that goes with it, well, you have more will power than I do. I found all these stories to be very entertaining.

The great fanzine publisher Justin Marriott contributes an article about Dirty Missions in British comics, featuring a couple of my favorite series, the Rat Pack and the Convict Commandos, both written by Alan Hebden, along with covering a number of other series that sound intriguing. Blogger/author Joe Kenney provides an essay about his introduction to the men’s adventure magazines, and like everything he writes, it’s enjoyable and informative. I mentioned Bruce Minney, but there are also dozens of reproductions of great covers and interior art by Minney, Norm Eastman, Gil Cohen, Frank McCarthy, Al Rossi, Walter Popp, and Franklin Wittmack, as well as others I’ve probably overlooked or forgotten. And that doesn’t even include the features on beautiful models Eva Lynd and Mala Mastroberte. For great art and production, you just can’t beat MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY.

The Dirty Mission Issue gets the same very high recommendation from me that the previous issues have. You can buy it directly from the publisher via his eBay page. And coming up next time around, as previewed in this one: the Heist Issue! Something tells me it’ll be a good one.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Startling Stories, May 1948

Earle Bergey, of course. And behind his cover in this issue of STARTLING STORIES: Henry Kuttner, Ray Cummings, Frank Belknap Long, Arthur Leo Zagat, Robert Moore Williams, Paul Ernst (a reprint from THRILLING WONDER STORIES twelve years earlier), George O. Smith, and John Russell Fearn. Not all of those are favorites of mine, but it's still a lineup of solid, prolific, well-respected science fiction authors.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, December 15, 1934

Replace one of the Stalwart Heroes (probably the guy in the red shirt) with a Wounded Old Geezer, and you'd have another instance of the trio that shows up on so many Western pulp covers. We've certainly got the Angry, Gun-Totin' Redhead, although I question her aim a little bit. I think this cover is by either Walter Baumhofer or Tom Lovell, but as always, I could certainly be wrong about that. As usual, DIME WESTERN has some great authors in its pages: Walt Coburn, W.C. Tuttle, Harry F. Olmsted writing as Bart Cassidy with one of his Tensleep Maxon stories, Ray Nafziger, Robert E. Mahaffey, and C.K. Shaw. The C.K. stands for Chloe Kathleen, by the way. Shaw was one of the relatively few female authors to contribute prolifically to the Western pulps. My impression is that Tuttle didn't appear very often in Popular Publications pulps, but I could be wrong about that, too. At any rate, this appears to be a fine issue. 

From the Files of . . . Mike Hammer - Mickey Spillane and Ed Robbins

As a Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer fan for more than fifty years, I was surprised that I didn’t even know this book existed until recently. Published by Hermes Press in 2013, FROM THE FILES OF . . . MIKE HAMMER reprints the Mike Hammer comic strip that ran for less than two years in 1952 and ’53 and is still available in both print and digital editions.

Editor Max Allan Collins provides the usual fine introduction, covering the background for the strip and information on who did what. The art is by Ed Robbins, an artist I’m not really familiar with, but he does a great job all the way through, with superb storytelling and a version of Hammer that just looks right. Mickey Spillane provided plots and contributed to some of the scripts, and Robbins handled much of the writing as well as the art. Veteran comics scripter Joe Gill worked on the strip early on but didn’t last long.

Although the strips ran in the usual daily and Sunday form, with different storylines in each format, this volume collects them in different sequences. In the first daily continuity, “Half-Blonde”, Mike Hammer, always the champion of the underdog, investigates the murder of a bum. Not surprisingly, the case turns out to have a much larger scope than that. While in the hospital recuperating from injuries suffered during that case, Mike finds himself involved in the mystery of “The Bandaged Lady”. In “The Child”, he’s hired to rescue the kidnapped child of a mob boss.

The title of the next daily continuity, “Another Lonely Night”, harkens back to what many, including myself, consider Spillane’s best novel, ONE LONELY NIGHT. In this one, Mike is targeted for death by mob killers after he witnesses a gangland execution. “Christmas Story” is a minor but predictably heart-warming tale in which Mike, feeling like Scrooge, corrals a shoplifter dressed as Santa Claus. Finally, in “Adam and Kane”, Mike has an actual client for once, an elderly criminal who hires him to locate his long-estranged son.

The title of the first Sunday storyline is “Comes Murder”, which, as Collins explains in his introduction, is designed to fit with the strip’s overall title: “From the Files of Mike Hammer . . . Comes Murder”. It’s likely that Spillane scripted this story himself. It certainly reads like his work. Mike protects a young couple from a vindictive gambling kingpin, but there’s more to it than a bad debt. He gets a hand in this case from a beautiful blond Amazon who may or may not be trustworthy.

Another beautiful blonde figures prominently in the plot of “The Sudden Trap”. Mike is passing through a small town when he spots a Hollywood starlet who’s out of place there . . . especially since she was believed to have been killed in a car wreck two years earlier. Mike’s curiosity won’t allow him to move on until he’s solved the mystery of her true identity.

The third and final Sunday continuity is the aptly named “Dark City”, in which Mike gets mixed up in the dangerous affairs of a beautiful redhead and her shell-shocked Korean War vet brother. Several panels in this story are considerably more suggestive than most comic strips were in those days, and it’s thought that may have contributed to the strip’s cancellation. I’m just glad Spillane and Robbins were able to finish the storyline. It wraps everything up in a downbeat but effective manner.

I really had a fine time reading this book. It brought back a lot of memories of racing through Mike Hammer novels in study hall at school, on my parents’ front porch, and at my sister’s house. The art is good, the scripts are top-notch, and I can’t imagine any Spillane fan not enjoying this collection. FROM THE FILES OF . . . MIKE HAMMER gets a very high recommendation from me.

The Hardy Boys Mysteries, 1927-1979: A Cultural and Literary History - Mark Connelly

After reading and enjoying Leslie McFarlane’s memoir, GHOST OF THE HARDY BOYS, recently, I decided to read more about the Hardy Boys series. Mark Connelly’s THE HARDY BOYS MYSTERIES, 1927-1979: A CULTURAL AND LITERARY HISTORY, was published by McFarland & Company in 2008 and is still available from Amazon. It covers some of the same ground as Leslie McFarlane’s book but goes into much more detail about Edward Stratemeyer and the syndicate he founded to mass-produce children’s and juvenile series books, as well as everything that happened after McFarlane left the series for good in 1947.  (Earlier, McFarlane had taken a hiatus from the series from 1938 to 1941, resulting in five Hardy Boys novels written by John Button.) I haven’t actually read a Hardy Boys book for at least 55 years, but during the time I was a fan, I read books from all different eras of the series, so I found Connelly’s book informative and enjoyable.

Connelly’s style isn’t as breezy and fast-moving as McFarlane’s, of course. McFarlane was a fictioneer while Connelly is an academic. And that also means there are entire chapters on race, gender, and class in the series, but those subjects get a pretty even-handed treatment from the author and Connelly doesn’t get bogged down in lecturing. It’s interesting to see how attitudes evolved and publishing practices changed in response. (I still think the early books were much better before they were rewritten, though.) He also covers the various TV series based on the series. I remember the Hardy Boys serial that ran on THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB and liked it at the time, although to be honest I was more of a Spin and Marty fan.

McFarlane’s memory played one pretty good trick on him in the writing of his memoir, and Connelly repeats that mistake from GHOST OF THE HARDY BOYS. When McFarlane went to work for the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1926, his first assignment was to write a book in the Dave Fearless series, which was published under the house-name Roy Rockwood. McFarlane writes at length in his memoir about how thrilled he was to be Roy Rockwood, because when he was a boy he read all the Bomba, the Jungle Boy books by Roy Rockwood. That’s not possible because the first Bomba book wasn’t published until 1926, the same year McFarlane went to work for Stratemeyer. However, Stratemeyer used the name as early as 1905, so McFarlane certainly could have read books with that pseudonym on them. Just not Bomba. (By the way, I can certainly understand how he felt. I was thrilled to be Brett Halliday.)

I’ve digressed here. THE HARDY BOYS MYSTERIES, 1927-1979 is a fine book and I enjoyed reading it. If you’re a fan of the series, or just of boy’s adventure books in general, I recommend it and think it’s well worth your time. And I’m now in the odd position of having read more about the Hardy Boys in the past half-century than I have of their actual exploits.