Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery Magazine, January 1945

This issue of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE came long after its heyday as a Weird Menace pulp, but judging by the line-up of authors inside, it was still a pretty darned good detective pulp: Fredric Brown, Day Keene, William R. Cox, Robert Turner, Cyril Plunkett, Larry Sternig, and a couple I'm not familiar with, Steve Herrick and Ken Lewis. That's a pretty good cover by Gloria Stoll, too. Cox's story features his series character Tom Kincaid. He expanded some of these stories into full-length novels, but I don't know if this was one of them.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, May 1941

That's a great, action-packed cover by Norman Saunders on this issue of WESTERN TRAILS. Dean Owen is probably the best-remembered of the authors inside. Other pulpsters on hand in this issue are Cliff Walters, Jay Karth, Art Kercheval, Jack Sterrett, Duane Yarnell (who went on to write a couple of good hardboiled novels for Gold Medal in the Fifties), and one I haven't heard of, P.H. Branford. I'm sure it was an entertaining issue.

Sexton Blake: The House of the Hanging Sword - Gwyn Evans

It had been a while since I read a Sexton Blake yarn. I realized that while I’d read stories from early in Blake’s history and also late entries from the so-called New Era, I’d never read anything from what’s considered the Golden Age for the character, the Twenties and Thirties. So I picked up a collection called SEXTON BLAKE WINS, which reprints six novellas and three short stories from that period. The first novella is “The House of the Hanging Sword”, from the February 10, 1934 issue of DETECTIVE WEEKLY, and is by Gwyn Evans, one of the most popular Blake authors. A series of mysterious, apparently unrelated disappearances draws Blake into a dangerous case that involves an isolated house in the English countryside, robed and cowled villains, and plenty of blood and thunder. Great fun that gallops right along.

Batman & Superman in World's Finest: The Silver Age, Volume One - Edmond Hamilton, Bill Finger, et al.

When I was a kid I was a sporadic reader of the Superman and Batman team-ups in WORLD’S FINEST. I only had so much money to spend on comic books. Now there’s lots of stuff I never read back in the day that I can catch up on. For the past couple of months, I’ve been reading BATMAN & SUPERMAN IN WORLD’S FINEST: THE SILVER AGE, VOLUME ONE, which reprints the first meeting of Superman and Batman from SUPERMAN #76 in 1952 and then the regular Superman/Batman series from WORLD’S FINEST #71-94, from 1954 to 1958 . . . which was before I could read, so I couldn’t have read them anyway. Most of the stories were written by Edmond Hamilton. Several are by Bill Finger, the co-creator of Batman. The art is mostly by Dick Sprang, the regular Bat-artist in the Fifties. A few stories were drawn by the great Curt Swan, the iconic Superman artist as far as I’m concerned. It’s an entertaining volume, especially the story where Luthor and The Joker team up.

But . . . these short (12 pages), gimmicky, stand-alone stories don’t have much impact. The villains are mostly petty crooks with stupid schemes, and there’s never any real sense of danger for our heroes. I can understand why, after a steady diet of stories like this, the stuff that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko came up with over at Marvel just a few years later was like a punch in the gut to the comics readers of the time. The difference is really stark (no pun intended). Despite that, I enjoyed this collection and already have the second one on my Kindle. For long-time comics fans, it’s worth reading. Available in paperback and e-book editions.

Hardcase Halloran - William Heuman

A solid hardboiled Ace Double Western from one of the most reliable authors in the genre. Gun-for-hire Thorpe Halloran sets out on a personal mission for a change, the search for the corrupt army officer responsible for the theft of a large payroll and the murder of sixteen soldiers, including Thorpe’s younger brother. Heuman mixes in a bit of a range war plot and a romantic triangle in this vengeance quest yarn and does a good job of bringing everything to a satisfactory climax with a nice shootout in a ghost town. A few bits get a little repetitive, which keeps this from landing in the top rank of Heuman’s work, but it’s still very entertaining and well worth reading. His books and stories usually have good opening lines and this one is no exception:  The way Thorpe Halloran had it figured out, a man was going to die this night. I kind of had to keep turning the pages after that.

Men's Adventure Quarterly #9: Croc Attack! - Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, eds.

Editors Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham deliver another winner in CROC ATTACK!, the ninth issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, the beautifully illustrated journal that reprints the best of the Men’s Adventure Magazines from the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. Authors included in this collection of stories about humans battling with crocodiles and alligators are paperbacker Robert Edmond Alter (one of my favorites), pulpster Brian O’Brien, and MAM veteran Leon Lazarus, along with a number of pseudonyms concealing unknown authors. And plenty of wonderful artwork, of course. A gorgeous package and great fun to read, as always. Highly recommended, available in paperback and e-book editions at Amazon.

Flesh Fix - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Political corruption, blackmail, bribery, and multiple murders all figure in the plot of FLESH FIX, a crime novel masquerading as sleaze as so many of those softcore books are. Ben Haas’s writing is smooth and fast, as always, and kept me flipping the pages in this tale of a formerly honest reporter trying to regain his self-respect after being roped into a crooked politician’s inner circle. And to be fair, there actually is quite a bit of sex in this novel, and it’s fairly graphic for 1964. It’s a good yarn and I enjoyed it.

Blog Update

A series of real-life issues, some unforeseen and some we knew were coming, has kept me from posting here in recent days. I considered leaving the blog up but closing it down as far as new posts. However, I don't want to do that. If I can keep it going until next summer, that'll be 20 years, and that's a good run. (The WesternPulps email group will turn 25 next spring, and I intend to continue with it, too.)

So I've written some short reviews of the books I've read lately and will schedule those for this week. Going forward, that's probably how I'll proceed, depending on the time and energy I have. No, I'm not sick, and I don't mean for it to sound that way, just swamped with sad, annoying, time-consuming developments, much like just about everybody else in the world. With luck, the pulp posts will resume next weekend. I'm still writing novels and have enough work lined up to last through next year, so the pages will continue to flow.

In the meantime . . .

Now Available: Kingfisher P.I. - James Reasoner and Livia J. Washburn

Callista Kingfisher is a former mixed martial arts fighter and one of the top stunt performers in Hollywood. But when an accident on a movie set leaves her badly injured, she goes home to Corpus Christi, Texas, to recuperate.

Callie’s triplet brother Joseph is a top private investigator, and when he lands the job of tracking down a fugitive who has disappeared into the thick Piney Woods of East Texas, Callie decides she’ll give her brother a hand with the case. Both Kingfishers are plunged into the middle of a deadly feud between rival crime families, and Callie quickly discovers that the real thing is even more dangerous than making action movies.

New York Times bestseller James Reasoner and critically acclaimed mystery author Livia J. Washburn team up for KINGFISHER P.I., the first in a new series of exciting, action-packed mystery novels that will leave you breathless with their suspense, adventure, and humor.

We're excited about this series and have had a lot of fun working on it so far. It's available from Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions, as well as at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Scribd, and Smashwords. The second book should be out after the first of the year and the third one sometime next spring. If you like fast-paced private detective yarns, you'll enjoy them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, December 10, 1934

When he was still a practicing attorney in California, Erle Stanley Gardner often had Chinese immigrants as clients and was very sympathetic to them and the injustices some of them suffered. I'm surprised he didn't write more stories set in Chinatown. "The Black Egg" in this issue of SHORT STORIES appears to be one of them, judging from the cover. I don't own this issue, it doesn't appear to be on-line anywhere, and I don't believe the story has ever been reprinted, so I don't know anything else about it. But since it's by Erle Stanley Gardner, I'm willing to bet it's good. (I wish more of Gardner's pulp stories would be reprinted, by the way.) There are some other excellent authors in this issue, including Donald Barr Chidsey, J. Allan Dunn, Harry Sinclair Drago, and Clifford Knight. And the usual red sun in the cover by Frederick Witten is huge this time around.