Davy Jones' Loot - Albert Richard Wetjen

“Davy Jones’ Loot”, the second Stinger Seave story from Albert Richard Wetjen, appeared in the December 1938 issue of ACTION STORIES. This is a flashback to the early days of Seave’s career as the fast-shooting skipper of a trading ship in the South Seas. While stealing some pearls from an island lagoon under Japanese jurisdiction, Seave encounters another sea captain who will become a long-running enemy of his. The clash between the two of them, which goes back and forth in this tale, finally resolves in a particularly satisfying manner.

The plot in this story isn’t as complex as in the previous entry in the series, “Terror Island”, but once again Wetjen hints at a much larger story going on. It reads as if the tale of Stinger Seave’s career might turn into a real South Seas epic. Whether or not Wetjen actually gets around to spinning those yarns, or just continues to drop tantalizing hints at them, we’ll just have to wait and see, I suppose. While “Davy Jones’ Loot” isn’t as good as “Terror Island”, I enjoyed it a great deal and will keep reading. You can find this one at the Pulpgen Archive, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery, July 1942

By the middle of 1942, DIME MYSTERY wasn't really a Weird Menace pulp anymore, but some influences still remained. Some of the Weird Menace authors moved right on over into writing more traditional mystery yarns, although judging by the titles, some bizarre elements remained. Wyatt Blassingame is an example in this issue, with a story called "Death Doesn't Care". Another story, "Satan Rocks the Casket", sounds even more like a Weird Menace story, but since the author is Francis K. Allan (not known as a Weird Menace guy) writing as Joe Kent, it's unlikely this story strays too far from the usual detective pulp fare. Allan has another story in this issue under his own name. Also on hand are Day Keene, William R. Cox, and William Campbell Gault, and that's a great trio of authors right there. I don't know the cover artist, but he (or she) turned in a dramatic image. Mummy cases always mean trouble.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, August 1935

I think that's a roulette wheel behind the cowboy in this cover by R.G. Harris, adding to our list of unsafe activities in the Old West. I've heard of losing your shirt while gambling, but I think he's carrying it to an extreme. This issue of THRILLING WESTERN includes stories by Ray Nafziger (writing as Grant Taylor), Syl MacDowell, Allan K. Echols, Claude Rister, Cliff Walters, Wilton West, Frank Carl Young, and house-name Jackson Cole. With the exception of Nafziger, MacDowell, and Echols, none of those are remembered much today, but I'm sure it was an entertaining issue.  

Homicide's Their Headache - Carl G. Hodges

As you know, I'm a longtime fan of private eye stories and don't mind a bit if they make use of elements that have become clichés in the eyes of some readers. In the novelette "Homicide's Their Headache" (THRILLING DETECTIVE, August 1948), author Carl G. Hodges does exactly that. The narrator is a private detective with the unlikely name Bill Starch, who operates in a small midwestern city, cracks wise and banters with almost everybody he encounters, has a beautiful secretary, gets knocked out while investigating a case (twice in the space of 20 pages!), has a nemesis on the police force (a homicide detective with the even more unlikely name Flemming Morf) as well as a sympathetic cop who helps him out, and gets involved in complicated cases involving multiple murders and a slew of suspects, who he gathers at the end to expose the killer after explaining how he figured it all out. For a novelette, Hodges crams a lot into this tale!

The story starts out with Starch trying to get paid for a case where his wealthy client stiffed him on the fee after Starch located a missing man for him. Of course, when Starch goes to confront the client, the guy has been murdered. (The victim's name is Elsberry Dilweg, continuing the trend of odd names in this story.) The killing leads to a matrimonial agency con game, a fortune in oil-rich land, disabled World War II vets, a beautiful but probably crooked dame, and a second murder. Starch untangles the whole mess, of course.

I don't know much about Carl G. Hodges. He wrote a mystery novel, MURDER BY THE PACK, that was the other half of an Ace Double with Frank Kane's Johnny Liddell novel ABOUT FACE. I had a copy of that book years ago, but I don't think I ever read Hodges' novel. He also wrote some historical non-fiction books for the juvenile market, as well as a couple of dozen mystery and Western stories for assorted pulps in a career that lasted from the Twenties to the Fifties. Several of his mystery stories published in THRILLING DETECTIVE were about a crime-solving sports reporter, his only series character that I know of. "Homicide's Their Headache" is the only appearance of Bill Starch.

Hodges' style seems to have been influenced by Robert Leslie Bellem's Dan Turner stories, with its fast pace, complicated plot, and colorful slang, but Hodges lacks Bellem's inspired goofiness. Even so, I enjoyed this story quite a bit. It's no lost masterpiece, by any means, but still fun if you don't mind the stereotypes. And let's be honest: sometimes that's exactly what I want.

Also, in a bit of synchronicity, the issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE in which "Homicide's Their Headache" appears also features a Nick Ransom story by Robert Leslie Bellem, Nick being a sort of toned down Dan Turner himself.

If this story sounds like it might appeal to you, you can check it out on the Pulpgen Archive, along with several more stories by Hodges and hundreds of other pulp stories.

Terror Island - Albert Richard Wetjen

Albert Richard Wetjen was a prolific author of mostly nautical and South Seas adventure yarns for the pulps. Several different series characters appeared in his stories, including the wonderfully named Shark Gotch and Typhoon Bradley. “Terror Island”, in the October 1938 issue of ACTION STORIES, introduces another Wetjen series character, Stinger Seave, the ultrahardboiled skipper of a trading ship in the South Seas.

In “Terror Island”, Seave, his first mate Big Bill Gunther, and the rest of the crew have put ashore in a cove at an isolated island to scrape barnacles off the hull and make other repairs. While they’re there, two more ships show up, one in pursuit of the other, and in one of those coincidences that drive the plots of so many pulp stories, the two people on the ship being chased are known to Seave, and they bring up dark, tragic memories from his past when they beg for his help against their ruthless pursuers.

Coincidence or not, Wetjen makes the plot work just fine, and he also throws in one angle that makes this story really stand out from the usual pulp adventure fare. He sets up a dilemma that isn’t really resolved in this story, and that makes me eager to read the other five stories in this series, to see whether or not he can pull off this unique twist. The Stinger Seave series has never been collected, as far as I know, but all six stories are available at various places on line. If you’re a pulp adventure fan, you should give “Terror Island” a try and see if you enjoy it as much as I did. You can find it here, along with hundreds of other pulp stories.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Magic Carpet Magazine, July 1933

This pulp also contains a Robert E. Howard story, his historical novelette "The Lion of Tiberias". But also behind that J. Allen St. John cover, you'll find a superb novella by H. Bedford-Jones, "Pearls From Macao" (which Tom Roberts reprinted as an early entry in his Black Dog Books line, many years ago, the edition I read and remember fondly), as well as stories by E. Hoffmann Price, Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, Warren Hastings Miller, and Geoffrey Vace, who was actually Hugh B. Cave's brother Geoffrey. This is just a spectacular issue of THE MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE, a great example of why the pulps were so wonderful, and if you want to read it for yourself, Adventure House has reprinted the whole thing. High recommended.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Cowboy Stories, July 1937

Since Robert E. Howard Days is going on in Cross Plains this weekend, I thought it appropriate to post the cover of one of the Western pulps in which Howard's work appeared. In this case it's the July 1937 issue of COWBOY STORIES, which includes Howard's Buckner J. Grimes story "Knife-River Prodigal". This is one of the stories that sold after Howard's death and appeared almost exactly a year later. I don't know the cover artist, but it's certainly a great example of how red and yellow dominated Western pulp covers. Also in this issue are Samuel Taylor, Bruce Douglas, W.D. Hoffman, and an author billed as Chief Henry Red Eagle, with a story called "Wampum Swamp 'Em", which makes me think it's probably not a serious examination of Indian life in the Old West.

The Shadow 1941: Hitler's Astrologer - Denny O'Neil and Michael Kaluta

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a big fan of The Shadow (mostly the pulp version) and have been for more than fifty years now. So it’s not surprising that I picked up a hardcover of this graphic novel when it first came out in 1988. THE SHADOW 1941: HITLER’S ASTROLOGER is by the writer/artist team of Denny O’Neil and Michael Kaluta, who produced quite a few excellent issues of The Shadow comic book series in the Seventies.

It's also not too surprising that I never got around to reading that copy I bought back then. I have the attention span of a six-week-old puppy, after all. However, I discovered a while back that Dynamite Comics has reissued HITLER’S ASTROLOGER in hardback, and there’s even an ebook edition that’s available on Kindle Unlimited. (Back in 1988 when the book first came out, none of that would have made any sense at all.) Anyway, I figured it was finally time for me to read it.

I’m glad I did. The script by O’Neil and Kaluta, which has The Shadow and his agents manipulating real-world events involving the Nazi Bund, Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, Operation Barbarossa, and Adolph Hitler himself, of course, is action-packed, intriguing, and moves along very nicely. It doesn’t quite capture the same feeling as Walter B. Gibson’s magnificent pulp creation, but as pastiche goes, it’s pretty darned good. Kaluta’s art, though, with inks by Russ Heath (a comic book legend in his own right) is just outstanding, a superb job of creating a blend between precarious events in the real world and the breakneck machinations of The Shadow and his crew of helpers. I had a great time reading this graphic novel, which, ultimately, is the most important thing to me. In the unlikely event that you’re a fan of The Shadow but haven’t read it, like me until recently, I give it a high recommendation.

Scheme - Jeffery Deaver

I’ve read only one novel by Jeffery Deaver (THE BONE COLLECTOR), but I’ve read a couple of collections of his short stories and several of the novellas he’s written in recent years. The latest of those novellas is SCHEME, a police procedural in which a detective is on the trail of a domestic terrorist organization planting bombs. The terrorists communicate with each other about where the bombs are to be placed by using a bizarre code involving poems. Which (naturally enough if you’ve read enough stories like this) means that our cop protagonist has to recruit a beautiful female English professor to help him crack the code.

Of course, this being a Jeffery Deaver yarn, nothing is quite what it seems at first glance, and that predictable unpredictability actually works a little against the story’s effectiveness, if you know what I mean. When it's a given that some enormous twist will be coming along later, you start thinking early on about what it might be. And in the case of SCHEME, I’m not sure it really works that well.

Luckily, Deaver has a nice touch with characters and his prose is smooth and enjoyable to read. SCHEME flies by and is entertaining enough, but I wouldn’t rank it near the top of Deaver’s novellas. I’d still rather read something like this than some 600-page doorstop with not nearly enough plot, like you get in some modern thrillers.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Startling Stories, November 1951

Not a space babe in sight, so you know this isn't an Earle Bergey cover. In fact, it's by the great Alex Schomberg, who painted some of the best rocket ships you'll ever find. This issue of STARTLING STORIES also has a very strong group of writers, with a lead novel by Eric Frank Russell and short stories by Mack Reynolds and Fredric Brown, William Morrison, and my old mentor Sam Merwin Jr. If you want to check it out, the whole issue is on-line here.