Serial Pulp: THE SPIDER'S WEB (1938), Chapter One: Night of Terror

For some people, pulp fiction is embodied by crimefighting heroes like Doc Savage and The Shadow. They're the two best known of a generation of pulp heroes that flourished in the 1930s, before and during the advent of comic book superheroes. One of their peers was The Spider, "Master of Men," who was published by Popular Publications, while the big two were put out by Street & Smith. Among the most popular hero pulps, The Spider was the first to be made into a movie serial, not long after The Shadow had made his unsuccessful feature-film debut. In pulp, The Spider's adventures were written mostly by Norvell W. Page, using the Grant Stockbridge pseudonym. I find Page the best of the hero-pulp writers, the master of the often overwrought Walter Gibson (who wrote The Shadow as Maxwell Grant) and the often clumsy Lester Dent (who wrote Doc Savage as Kenneth Roberson). Page could paint a word picture of dramatic if not fantastic action better than his rivals, and his apocalyptic imagination makes The Spider resonate with modern readers in ways his rivals can't match. Of course, what Page wrote might be called "destruction porn" today, because The Spider's enemies don't play around. They're usually terrorists of some sort rather than mere gangsters, for whom mass destruction is the way to power or the way to wealth through mass extortion. Cities were devastated and civilians slaughtered before the Spider meted out justice to the guilty; like comic-book heroes today, The Spider wasn't very good at preventing mayhem. He was better at assuring that people didn't get away with it. Richard Wentworth was The Spider, but unlike the Zorro-Batman archetype, Wentworth also fought crime in his civilian identity as an amateur criminologist and often spent large portions of Spider stories doing so out of disguise. Wentworth had a modest support team consisting of his chauffeur Jackson, his butler Jenkins, his all-around man friday Ram Singh and his fiancee Nita Van Sloan. No relation to Edward the actor, Nita often bemoans the apparent fact that Richard's costumed career prevents them from marrying -- presumably since it would be impracticable for them to have children -- but for all intents and purposes she embraces his lifestyle to the point of pinch-hitting as The Spider on occasion. She may not have the same sort of training Richard and his other helpers have, but a machine gun is often a great equalizer and she can use one with relish. Rounding out the regular cast is Police Commissioner Kirkpatrick, a friend of Wentworth who suspects him of being The Spider, whom he'd have to arrest as a killer vigilante, but never can prove the dual identity.

Serials notoriously wrought havoc on comic-book heroes, altering origins and other details to suit often unclear purposes. By comparison, at least on the evidence of Chapter One, The Spider's Web is fairly faithful to its pulp source. Its major innovation is the costume The Spider (Warren Hull) wears. While the pulp character often scurried through the city in a fright wig and makeup to scarify criminals, he was shown on the magazine covers in more debonair garb and a modest domino mask. The cinematic Spider wears a full face mask with a spiderweb pattern matching that of his cape. He has his full supporting cast, though the police commish's name has been shortened arbitrarily to Kirk. Nita (Iris Meredith) makes a good first impression as co-pilot of Wentworth's private plane as they're returning home from some vacation. She actually expects to be married, since Richard has resolved to give up being The Spider. An attempt to sabotage their landing soon changes his mind, and Nita takes the disappointment like a good sport.

The sabotage was perpetrated by minions of The Octopus (??? in Chapter One), who sees Wentworth the criminologist as an obstacle to his plan to control all transportation and thus apply a stranglehold to the entire national economy. The Octopus is a classic serial mystery villain, someone whose identity under his white hood we'll be invited to guess over the remaining chapters. He walks with a limp, afflicted with a shriveled leg that's almost certainly a bit of misdirection. He speaks into a microphone and his voice is amplified (and distorted, no doubt) by speakers in his office, where black-hooded minions report and await orders.

 

Like the typical Spider villain, The Octopus takes no prisoners; at the climax of Chapter One he plots to blow up a bus depot, but The Spider manages to evacuate the place simply by showing up and terrorizing commuters with his presence. In case that didn't suffice, he and Ram Singh (future Ed Wood collaborator Kenne "Kenneth" Duncan, playing the man from India with no hint of an accent) have a gunfight with the Octopus's gang, including -- it's my guess since he isn't credited -- a very young John Dehner. The bomb is on a bus that The Spider tries to drive a safe distance from the building and any civilians, but he doesn't get the thing a safe distance from himself. Of course, then as now, the teaser for the next episode assures us, as if serial audiences needed such assurance, that Richard Wentworth will survive to face new crises next week.

 

The Spider's Web intends to highlight Richard Wentworth as a master of disguise. In the opening credits Warren Hull is introduced thrice over, as Wentworth, The Spider, and his one-eyed underworld alias Blinky McQuade. Wentworth also briefly amuses Nita with a vaudevillian Chinaman bit. While Wentworth is shown to be a quick-change artist, Hull will depend on his vocal versatility to put over his different guises. He has a charming moment in this chapter while changing into Blinky when he has a little conversation between two of his personalities. If people thought the Spider one of the nuttier pulp heroes, that moment won't dissuade them, but it does give the hero more character than the typical serial protagonist. Hull may not have the authentic Spider's cold fury, but he makes a likable action hero and, to be fair, this story is just getting started. Stay tuned for more chapters through the month of July, or get ahead of the game by watching the serial yourself at the Internet Archive.

Pulp on Film: HENRY GOES ARIZONA (1939)

Henry Harrison Conroy was about five feet, six inches in height, rotund, 55 years of age, with a spare growth of taffy-colored hair on his head. His face was moon-like, the muscles sagging quite a bit now, and adorned with a huge, putty-like nose which was forever red. In dress he was a typical down-at-the-heel vaudevillian, an old-time tragedian in manner.

- W. C. Tuttle

"Henry Goes Arizona" was published in the February 23, 1935 issue of the weekly Argosy pulp magazine, a copy of which I happen to own. The seeming grammar error presumes that one "goes Arizona" as one "goes Hollywood." W. C. Tuttle was a veteran pulp writer who specialized, to be specific, in the western comedy detective genre. He'd already been writing such stories for something like twenty years, with Hashknife Hartley being his most enduring character. Henry Harrison Conroy may have passed Hashknife in popularity. Before 1935 was over he had graduated from novelettes to "book-length novels," i.e. serials, and regularly won the Argosy cover when a new serial began. After Argosy underwent a format change in the early 1940s, Tuttle moved Henry over to Short Stories, a biweekly pulp, and continued writing about the so-called "Shame of Arizona" at least until late 1948.

Henry's first cover: Argosy, September 14, 1935.

A less flattering, more comical cover introducing a 1937 serial

This one's from 1938, after Argosy abandoned its signature red band cover format.

While Short Stories published numerous Henry stories, this 1947 issue has the character's only cover story.

By 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recognized Argosy as a source of likely screen material. The studio had launched a successful film series based on Max Brand's re-launch of his Dr. Kildare character in a series of Argosy serials. M-G-M made movies of two Marco Page serials, Fast Company and Fast and Loose, about yet another husband-wife team of detectives. As Henry Harrison Conroy was one of Argosy's most popular recurring characters, he must have seemed a likely prospect for the Tiffany studio. Once Metro acquired the rights, the only real question was whether the studio would do the obvious and hire W. C. Fields to play Henry. The original story practically begs Fields to play the part, harping often on Henry's red nose, and the pulp character never deviates from a Fieldsian ideal, albeit in benevolent mode. For all we know, this came close to happening. We know that Fields was in negotiations with M-G-M for the title role in The Wizard of Oz. Had the great man taken that part, and had a contract come with it, he very likely may have played Henry. But he signed with Universal instead and did a comedy western of his own, or of Mae West's, in 1940. And as it turned out, the man who played the Wizard, Frank Morgan, also played Henry Harrison Conroy.

Morgan shouldn't be blamed for the botch Metro made of Henry. Florence Ryerson and Milton Merlin adapted Tuttle's origin story, and Edward L. Marin directed it. Something clearly went wrong during the production. George Murphy and Ann Morris were cast as the story's romantic leads, and publicity items described the rigors they endured while making a western, but both ended up on the cutting-room floor. Someone had decided to make Henry Goes Arizona a kiddie film. This meant creating an original character, a little girl named Molly (Virginia Weidler) as the main figure for Henry to interact with. That move killed whatever distinctive quality the Henry stories have. They're really no great shakes. I've read some of the serials and they grow repetitive in a sitcom way as each of Henry's supporting cast comes in to do his particular comedy bit. Most of those characters are absent from the movie. We're left with Henry's principal sidekick, the alcoholic but still-sharp lawyer "Judge" Van Treece (Guy Kibbee), while the irascible cook Frijole and the stock Swede ranch-hand Oscar are nowhere to be found. Instead we have Boris (Tenen Holtz), who seems like nothing else but a nod to Mischa Auer's genuinely unorthodox Russian deputy in Destry Rides Again, which had come out earlier in 1939. While Kibbee may have made a good Judge Van Treece, despite the physical mismatch -- Judge is the tall man to the right on the Short Stories cover -- in the Pre-Code era, in the era of Code Enforcement there was almost no point in making a Henry movie at all. There's nothing especially violent or salacious about Tuttle's westerns, but if the Henry series has a particular spirit to it, that spirit can be described as whiskey-soaked. Henry and Judge are epic drinkers who imbibe at every opportunity. In our time, to get the same effect, they'd have to be stoners. Yet we can't have that innocent little girl consorting with a couple of drunks, so apart from occasional mentions of going somewhere for drinks we get nothing like Tuttle's characteristic scenes of his protagonists arguing sardonically in their cups, never as impaired mentally as people suggest. Instead, we get silly scenes in which Judge convinces Molly to hide in a hay loft so he can convince Henry that she's been kidnapped, and thus motivate him to stay in Tonto Town, where in story and film the over-the-hill vaudevillian has inherited a cattle ranch from a murdered brother, rather than flee from threats of violence, only to find Molly actually kidnapped by the time he brings Henry to the barn to tell him the truth. And we get pathetic scenes in which Molly tries to shame Henry into sticking it out despite his cowardice. To sum things up, Molly is an albatross around this film's scrawny, 66-minute neck, and there was no good reason for her to be there.

I think Frank Morgan could have played a more authentic Henry. Tuttle's character has a self-deprecating attitude toward himself and a bemused attitude toward everything happening around him, especially once, in later stories, he's made the sheriff of Wild Horse County. He has more cunning than most give him credit for, or else how could he solve all those mysteries, but his preposterous appearance and laid-back demeanor keep him on the brink of recall and earn the county the "Shame of Arizona" label that stuck with the series to the end. In short, imagine what Fields could have done as Henry, and I think Morgan could have done something similar. But the screenplay reduces Henry to a fuddy-duddy fraidy-cat until he's shamed into taking a stand and uses his makeup kit to lure his enemy into a trap. In the original story Henry charges into a burning bank because he suspects a corpse will be found inside. The film keeps some incidents from the story, including a banquet that ends with an assassination attempt and Henry mistaking catsup for blood. It also expands on a bit in which Henry takes a tumble while dismounting a horse, showing us his difficulties in climbing aboard in the first place, but Morgan isn't enough of a physical comic to keep the pratfalls interesting. Just about nothing is as it should be in this picture, and yet it shouldn't have been hard at all. For all the times when Hollywood improved on pulp or slick magazine material, there are also times like this one when Hollywood tried to improve on something that really was no masterpiece for starters and only managed to make it worse. As a result, Henry Goes Arizona stands forlornly alone while W. C. Tuttle kept on writing Henry stories for another decade. In this case, M-G-M should have left pulp fiction to the experts.

REAL PULP FICTION: Arthur Leo Zagat's "Thunder Tomorrow," ARGOSY, March 16, 1940

We resume our survey of pulp magazine fiction with a sequel to one of the most popular and controversial stories of 1939. Arthur Leo Zagat's "Tomorrow" imagined the coming of age of an isolated band of American refugee children who had survived a devastating invasion of the country, but had reverted to primitive simplicity and virtue. Sequels that year made clear that America had fallen to the "Asafrics," an unholy coalition of black and yellow men, in an apocalyptic race war. At least one Argosy letter writer called Zagat out for the racism of his premise, his heroic "Bunch" being lily-white. "Thunder Tomorrow," the first sequel to appear in several months, hints that Zagat took that criticism to heart. His effort to duck the racism charge is fascinating for an apparent sincerity that's partially undermined by a racism of less malignant but perhaps more intractable sort.

By the time of this newest story, the Bunch, led by Dikar (born Dick Carr) has joined forces with some of the underground resistance that had developed despite all odds, and with colonies of "beast men" who are, for all intents and purposes, white trash. The Asafrics announce that all Americans must make a fresh loyalty pledge of face deportation to the wastelands of Africa and Asia. To boost American morale, the resistance decides that the small army coalescing near the Bunch's mountain in downstate New York must score some sort of symbolic victory. Their target is the old military academy at West Point, now used as an Afrasic base. Dikar's early attempt to scout the site goes bad quickly and he's imprisoned inside the fortress. Captured by two black soldiers, presumably native Africans (described by the resistance as "the best soldiers in the world"), Dikar is turned over to a jailer. He notices that the jailer "was brown-faced, not black like the other Asafrics." Readers familiar with pulp dialects would quickly notice that the "brown" jailer talks differently from the "black" soldiers.

'Washton,' the Asafric with Dikar said, 'this one fellah special prisoner for Colonel Wangsing. Something happen to him, all our skin get flogged off. Unstan?'

 

'Yassuh, Sahgent,' Washton answered, his eyes gleaming white in the dimness as he goggled at Dikar, 'Ah unnerstands. You wan' him put in a cell by hisself?'

The Asafrics talk in something like standard pulp pidgin English, while Washton talks in something pulp readers would recognize as American negro dialect. Zagat is ready to answer a question at least some readers must have asked since his series started: what happened to the American blacks? His answer, in this case at least, is that African Americans are among the resistance's most effective inside men. Washton -- born Benjamin Franklin George Washington -- surprises Dikar by arranging for his escape from West Point. He surprises our hero even more by identifying himself as Agent X-18 of the resistance's Secret Net of operatives. Dikar either doesn't remember seeing, or has never seen, an authentic African American. He can't comprehend why an "Asafric soldier" would help the Americans. Washton explains:

'Dat's the beauty paht of it. See, w'en de Asafrics fust came, dey figgered us cullud people would want to jine up wid dem against de whites, and dey sent out word we'd be welcom. Dey foun' out dey figgered wrong.

'Dey foun' out we wuz Americans fust an' cullud after. But dah wuz some of us got de notion dat we cud mebbe fight 'em better from de inside, so we did jine up.

'But suppose they found you out?' [Dikar asks]

'Dem what dey fin's out,' Washton said, 'takes a long time to die, but dem what dey don't jus' keep on wukkin. Lots uh de sabotage dat's been happenin is de wuk of cullud men.'

Washton has accumulated detailed knowledge of the West Point defenses in the forlorn hope that it would be of use to a real resistance army. Learning that a real army is actually on the way, his response is "Glory be to the Lawd!" To our eyes, Zagat is working at cross purposes. Washton is clearly meant to prove that neither Zagat nor his story is racist, yet this resistance hero talks like Amos or Andy. Dialect is more problematic now than it was 75 years ago. Today we perceive a stigma of inferiority when Zagat may simply have felt an artistic imperative to write black speech as he thought he'd heard it. There's no excuse, however, when Dikar temporarily leaves Washton alone in the forest on their way to the resistance camp, and our black patriot says, "It's awful dahk, heah, an' it's just come to me dat dey says dese heah woods is ha'nted." Really, Arthur Leo Zagat? Washton has been risking his life spying in the belly of the beast, not to mention breaking Dikar out, but because he's a Negro he's skeered of ghosts?

The point Zagat wants to make with Washton is a welcome one, but the way he writes this black hero (who predictably enough sacrifices his life for Dikar before this installment ends) tends to remind me that even D. W. Griffith had good blacks in The Birth of a Nation. They were the ones who stayed loyal to their old massas and defended them from the depredations of the carpetbaggers and the more vicious blacks. Zagat actually deserves more credit for emphasizing that infiltration was African Americans' own idea, but he'd deserve more still if he could imagine free blacks as ongoing protagonists in his epic rather than the faithful retainer type that Washton unfortunately resembles. Washton's heroic intervention alone doesn't change the essentially racial nature of the Asafric war against the U.S., but to be fair Zagat has several more episodes of the "Tomorrow" series to go in which to refine if not redeem his vision of American resistance.

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY'S dilemma, Oct. 28, 1939

In this week's Argonotes pages we find an editorial confession that bears quoting at length:

If you are running a magazine concerned solely with fellows who plunge young women into steaming cauldrons, you can be reasonably sure that all your readers have a fondness for horrors. Otherwise they wouldn't buy the magazine. So you can go right ahead increasing the temperature of the cauldron, and everybody will be happy. The editor who publishes only fiction of a special sort -- detective or Western or fantastic -- has the comforting assurance that his public likes his specialty.

But it's different with us; we are infinitely more vulnerable. One week a letter will commend us on a recent Western story and demand more of same; the next week another reader will savagely dispose of that Western and beg to know why in heaven we don't eliminate that cowboy-and-Colt stuff, so that there will be more space for stories about the Australian bushmen. We could not satisfy all our readers if every published story were a masterpiece in its field; and that's why ours is the perilous and violent life.

At the start the editor is taking a shot at the so-called "shudder pulps" that were popular then and highly valuable as collectibles now. But the challenge of publishing a general interest pulp is nothing new for the Argosy. You can read Argonotes pages throughout the 1930s in the unz.org trove and see exactly what the 1939 editor means. Yet if Argosy has a problem in 1939 -- apart from having its fortunes tied to the Munsey company's reckless "Red Star" brand expansion --  it's not so much maintaining a balance of genres as maintaining a particular style. I've seen it said that the weekly was at its peak earlier in the Thirties, and by now I've read enough from that period, both at unz and in my own slow-growing collection, I'll at least agree that the 1939 magazine isn't as good as it was four or five years earlier. This issue, for instance, was almost unrelentingly mediocre. It's noteworthy only for the conclusion of Eando Binder's dystopian serial Lords of Creation, in which our hero, awakened from suspended animation 2,000 years in the future, improbably conquers the world. Most of the other stories were boring. Many seem boring in a particular way. My hunch is that Argosy in 1939 aspired to a status somewhere between pulps and slicks. Too many of the stories read as if they might have been submitted to Collier's or the Saturday Evening Post, or else they read as if they were meant mainly as raw material for movies. The tone is different from just a few years earlier. It simply seems less like pulp. There's less blood, less thunder -- to a certain extent less fantasy, apart from the designated "fantastics" that we'd call science fiction. As I've suggested before, the world seems less wide open than it did earlier in the Thirties, as if the buildup to a new world war was closing up other options for adventure, while higher literary ambitions, perhaps, often resulted only in a flatter tone, less perilous and violent despite the editor's joke. Certain stories and serials still manage the old feeling, but they seem increasingly like the exception that prove a rule.

The point of "Real Pulp Fiction" has never been to chart pulp's decline. What I really wanted was to call readers' attention to highlights from a wild world of pulp that parallels our wild world of cinema. Since I still want to do that, I'm going to give up the 75th anniversary march as a regular feature of the blog. I'll still report on the better, wilder stories from 1939 and 1940 as I read them, but I'll also spend more time further in the past exploring what I deem more classic pulp, not just in Argosy but in other magazines. As I start showing off my personal pulp collection you'll also see some later stuff, since I have a fancy for western pulps and feel they were at their best at the very end of the pulp era, from the late Forties to mid-Fifties, parallel to the evolution of the "adult western" in movies. Instead of reviewing entire issues, I'd like to spotlight specific stories in more detail as I did with Theodore Roscoe's "That Son of a Gun Columbo" earlier this month. Look forward to more and shorter pieces from this point forward, and maybe at long last a formal spinoff into a separate blog next year. Whatever happens, the focus from now on will be on pulps I really enjoy, from guilty pleasures to little classics of action and adventure in prose. This series is definitely to be continued!

Real Pulp Fiction: Theodore Roscoe, "That Son of a Gun Columbo," ARGOSY, Sept. 22, 1934

Let's observe Columbus Day with what might be the most representative sample from the pen of prolific pulpster Theodore Roscoe. The title is the title or lyric of a popular song, as is the case in Roscoe's small town-gothic Four Corners stories. It has a narrator daring his audience to disbelieve his tale, as in the Thibaut Corday series of Foreign Legion fantasies. And it has a hint of the undead, as Roscoe made a specialty of hinting at, teasing us with the prospect of Columbus as a zombie.

As I implied, this is an old-school indirect narrative, in that Roscoe doesn't drop us directly into the main story, but instead introduces his narrator as a character facing the skepticism of his hearers. In this case one McCord, an American engineer working in Haiti, tells his colleagues that the wreck of the Santa Maria can be found upriver, and then describes his personal encounter with Columbus himself. Back in 1913, when he was just starting out in Haiti, McCord met a Professor Upchurch, who wanted to go upriver to find the Santa Maria. Upchurch has a theory that Columbus died in Haiti, abandoned by his colleague/rival Martin Pinzon, who then delivered an impostor to be imprisoned in Spain and die the death assigned to Columbus by history. Upchurch, and Roscoe, have no romantic illusions about the great explorer.

The poor, meek Indians, they were harmless as pigeons, you know. They thought the white men had come from heaven, but they soon found out differently. My, yes! The Spanish didn't have any use for them and set about exterminating them most thoroughly. So thoroughly that there wasn't a handful left alive a hundred years later, and today they're extinct. The poor Indians were taken as slaves and their women were meek and good looking -- it isn't the chapter on Columbus they like to teach in public schools.

 

Thus Theodore Roscoe, revisionist. Moving on, Upchurch offers McCord $1,000 -- multiply that by something like twenty to get the value today -- to guide him upriver. Their trek is complicated by the reported presence in the jungle of a fugitive from the U.S., someone with the same theory about Columbus as Upchurch, but also convinced that the Santa Maria carried gold to be salvaged. Soon enough, this "Blackbeard" is on our protagonists' trail, which leads to strange places. At the end of the trail waits a "living mummy," the supposed last of the Arawack tribe -- the people doomed by their encounter with Columbus. "Your average Indian is about as wordy as his twin in front of a cigar store," McCord narrates, "but this fellow wasn't the ordinary five-cent brand. Not by a jugful! That blind mummy was the Grand Kleagle of storytellers, and he held us like flies in the moon-spun web of his yarn."

Guacanagri tells of the coming long ago of "two great sea birds [with] wings that shut out the sun, and shiny men on their backs to fold those wings." The shiny men kidnap the king's daughter and torture her for knowledge of gold, of which the Arawacks had none. Divine intervention drives the invaders to wander to their deaths in search of gold, but Guacanagri relates, in McCord's words, that "they had to keep going even after they were dead. Dead men must find graves, and those dead strangers couldn't find a cemetery."

For a professor, Upchurch is slow on the uptake. It's not until Guacanagri identifies the leader of the shiny men as "Don Cristoval" that the academic realizes that the "mummy" means Columbus and seems to be confirming his own hypothesis. McCord finds the whole thing hard to believe, but out of no where appears a man in a 15th century Spanish uniform.

"This Spaniard was from the day before yesterday," McCord narrates, "From just about five hundred years before!" The old boy bolts at the sight of our moderns, and a hysterical Upchurch leads McCord on a mad chase climaxing with their discovery of the Santa Maria, complete with crew, captive princess, and Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Implausibly moved by Guacanagri's tale of oppression, Upchurch goes berserk at what looks like a ghostly reenactment of Columbus's atrocities. Finally, McCord must confront the great man one-on-one, horrified at the thought of fighting someone already dead....

Could this be true? Of course not! It's all just a story -- but in the story, could it have happened as McCord says? I'll leave you with this link to find out for yourselves. "That Son of a Gun" is Roscoe in fine form, engaged in hard-boiled spookifying. It's a pretty sweeping adventure in 26 pages and gives some sense of the fun of pulp, even if you have to hold your nose at some racist lines, even as Roscoe takes what looks like today's "politically correct" line on Columbus. Just as he refuses to sugarcoat the Columbus story, so we should take Roscoe and his fellow pulpsters straight, the better to understand how they and their readers saw the world in their time.

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1939

The devil of William Du Bois's serial, this week's cover story, is a veteran gossip columnist who's about to release a highly-publicized memoir. The ballyhoo in his paper, which is serializing the memoir, hints at reputations that may be ruined by the author's revelations. This first installment introduces a number of likely-to-be-offended people, along with another reporter who'll become our protagonist. You can see a whodunit being set up, and the only surprise is that someone besides the memoirist gets whacked. Instead, it's the newspaper's publisher who gets dumped out a window, while the manuscript of the memoir, delivered alarmingly close to deadline, is stolen. Du Bois tells it in hardboiled-newsman mode, as is only appropriate, and that makes The Devil's Diary entertaining so far.

In the other serials, Theodore Roscoe deepens the mystery of Remember Tomorrow by giving more details of the deaths blamed on the undead armies of the Battle of the Somme: they seem to have died in ways unique to the war, including one death by poison gas. By now there's an international cast of the living at the Chateau de Feu, a cross-section of Europe at the brink of the next war, along with our American mystery-writer protagonist. By this point things could go either way: it could be a supernatural phenomenon or it could be an elaborate fake-out; time and more chapters will tell. In the second installment of Eando (Earl and Otto) Binder's Lords of Creation, the glimmer of hope our hero saw last week, the airplane hinting at the survival of civilization in the far future in which he woke up, is belied when the plane delivers a delegation from "Antarka" demanding tribute from the near-Stone Age people of "Norak,"the old New York. The imperious Antarkans are the Lords of Creation, taking tribute in raw materials and human "helpers." This outrages our hero; the future, already dystopian due to the exhaustion of metal ores and the resulting technological decline, grows worse when he sees the world divided between masters and slaves. But the people among whom he lives are complacent, or else preoccupied with petty local wars with other tribes. Our protagonist decides to change the future, proposing to harvest metals from the ruins of New York City to even the odds, or at first to give his people the edge (of metal blades) over their local enemies.

The big name among this issue's stand-alone authors is Georges Surdez, the pulps' king of Foreign Legion fiction. The nearest thing Surdez has to a claim to fame today is his popularization, if not his outright invention of the deadly game of Russian Roulette in a 1937 Collier's short story of that title. It was something they did in the Legion, I guess -- or so Surdez claimed. As the Collier's credit indicates, Surdez was a writer who moved freely between the pulps and the so-called slicks like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. His shorter work usually went to the slicks while novelettes went to the pulps; since "The Blood Call" is a short story, it may have been rejected by Collier's before Argosy took it. Like many Foreign Legion stories, it focuses on a Legionnaire with a past. In this case, a German Legionnaire tries to provoke a duel with his commanding officer in his odd attempt to atone for having killed the commander's brother, a flier, during the Great War. All of this is told in flashback form, to explain to a visitor why the commander gives money generously to a drunken soldier; his idea is that the man who killed his brother should be worthy of him, not a beggar. The story's too short to be one of Surdez's better tales, but it definitely gives the flavor of his work.

The other headline writer this week is Ralph R. Perry, whose "Big Gun From Texas" is a mystery about horse-stealing, with the requisite gunplay involved. Richard Sale contributes "No Patriot There," one of his series of "what really happened" Civil War stories, this time involving a Virginia boy who, despite the histories you may have read, killed John Wilkes Booth. Harry Bedwell, a railroad-story specialist, gives us "Take 'Em Away, McCoy," about an engineer fighting Mexican bandits while dealing with his fiery Mexican girlfriend's jealousy of his affection for his engine. Not as funny as Bedwell thought, sad to say. Finally, Walter C. Brown takes a vacation from Chinatown and travels to the Dutch East Indies for "Savage Quest," but while the setting has changed, Brown's macabre racism still pervades the piece. This story also proves Brown an equal-opportunity offender when it comes to writing accents, since the story's cruel Dutch trader is saddled with a vaudeville accent. The actual protagonist is a Dyak tribesman who proves almost inexplicably loyal to the Dutch brute, protecting him from all menaces until Brown finally explains the savage's protective attitude. Suffice it to say that he doesn't really have the Dutchman's long-term interests at heart. This is a solid issue overall, with all the serials entertaining and points of interest in all the stand-alones. I'm going to take a couple of weeks off from the 1939 Argosy series, but I plan to be back in time for the conclusions of all the serials, in case I've kept anyone hanging. In the meantime, I may regale you with some items from my personal pulp collection -- so this is still TO BE CONTINUED.

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, SEPT. 23, 1939

Those medieval dudes on the cover this week aren't the advertised "Lords of Creation," however lordly they look. Look below and you'll see that they advertise Philip Ketchum's latest Bretwalda story, "The Long Journey." Ketchum advances his saga to the 14th century as the latest in his line of Wiltons returns to England from the wars in France to find his homeland in the grip of the Black Death. The cover illustrates one of the penitent processions he encounters during his long journey to find his wife and child, who are either evacuated or kidnapped. Inevitably there's a villain taking advantage of the chaos to build political power for himself. Less predictably, our hero has a mysterious sidekick, a Christ-like friar known only as "Friend" who exhibits strange talents at dramatic moments. Characters in the story speculate that Friend might well be the Lord of Creation, but he's more likely something Ketchum threw into his otherwise mundane epic to keep things interesting for himself. The Bretwalda stories aspire to bittersweetness, since the wielders of the magic axe are destined for great joy and great sorrow. The great joy this time is that the hero reunites with his wife. The great sorrow is that she's got the plague, and he's going to stay with her and most likely die as well, while their child is raised in safety to continue the line. Ketchum's variations on his themes help keep the series interesting for us as it enters the homestretch. We'll see the end of it before the year is out.

As for the co-cover story, the first chapter of Lords of Creation introduces us to two-in-one author Eando Binder. Sound out that first name and you get the idea. Eando combines the brothers Earl and Otto Binder. Otto is better known in some quarters as the main writer of Captain Marvel's adventures in the golden age of comics, while Eando's best known creation is probably the conscientious robot Adam Link. Lords is a work of naive satire in that the Binders really seem to believe that they're reversing a typical theme of "fantastic" literature. It's yet another sleeper-awakens tale in which a modern-day American revives from suspended animation several thousand years in the future. The twist in the opening chapter is that the sleeper expects to see a word of technological marvels and utopian civilization, and takes a stubborn long time to realize that the world of 5000 A.D. is actually stuck in a "Second Stone Age." A few wise men have mastered enough of our English language to communicate with him through crudely written messages, but the culture has reverted almost to a medieval level. The Binders expect this to shock readers, but my impression is that, as in our anxious time, fantasists of the 1930s quite often imagined a dark future. Things were pretty bad when Buck Rogers woke up, for instance, and in Argosy's last-such serial, Minions of the Moon, the sleeper awakens to find some humans reverting to Viking culture. The trend may have been different in the actual science-fiction pulps which may be the actual target of the Binders' satire. Lords may be ahead of its time in blaming the collapse of civilization on resource exhaustion, but the resource in question isn't oil but metal. Overproduction exhausted the world's ores, forcing humanity to return to wood, stone and animal power -- but once the Binders establish this misfortune, they tease us by closing with the sight of an airplane flying over the primitive future settlement. That's definitely a good way to keep us reading next week.

To round out the serials, the MacIsaac-Harkins dialect tale River Rogues meanders to its conclusion while Theodore Roscoe adds an international cast of suspects or victims to Remember Tomorrow, his mystery teasing murders in 1939 by undead casualties of the last Great War. It's still too early to tell whether Roscoe will keep it creepy or end up debunking it all. That uncertainty works when our hero, an American mystery writer, momentarily doubts his sanity when a German shows up asking directions to a military unit's position. He could be a ghost, but he's actually a tourist doing research on the battlefield -- or at least that's all he is for now. Written well before the second Great War broke out in September 1939, Roscoe's serial is certainly ominously timely, and it should also be fun to see whether he paints himself into a corner, and whether he escapes anyway.

The stand-alones this week include an unlikely crime romance from Donald Barr Chidsey, "Little Rat, What Now?" Bennett Foster's solid western, "Spurs for Sacatone," Richard Howells Watkins's sea story "Ticket at Twenty," in which a youthful first mate must thwart sabotage by his own captain, and Brice Purcell's weird tale "The Aztec Heart," in which the ancient Mexican blood keeps an otherwise sophisticated modern man alive after a fatal encounter in Europe so he can die the traditional way, sacrificed on a pyramid. Overall this one is a pretty entertaining mix of genres and settings with two strong serials and most of the rest quite readable. We'll have a new serial next week, and our first encounter in this series with the reigning master of Foreign Legion stories, Georges Surdez, along with plenty more besides.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1939

In 1939 an issue of Argosy went to newstands a week in advance of the cover date. The September 16 issue went on sale on a Wednesday the week before, and by that time Hitler had invaded Poland and World War II had begun. By an accident of timing that issue gives the cover to Theodore Roscoe's new serial, a tale of a Europe haunted by the ghosts of the last war. Earlier this year we've seen Roscoe in tall-tale-and-debunk mode. Whether writing American gothics in his fictional town of Four Corners or the Foreign Legion yarns of Thibaut Corday, Roscoe outlines fantastic scenarios only to render them "real" with often ridiculously mundane explanations. But Roscoe is also one of the pioneers of the zombie genre in literature, with serials published in Argosy, and Remember Tomorrow teases a turn toward that territory. It also dares us to look for the trick behind everything by making its protagonist an author of mystery novels. He's a down-on-his-luck American who's come to France to sell his family's last remaining major asset, a French chateau purchased by his late father decades earlier. The house proves difficult to sell. That's because it borders the Foret de Feu in the "Red Zone," where the worst fighting of the Battle of the Somme took place during the Great War. The neighbors claim that the war hasn't ended in the Red Zone, where the dead wage war on the living. Recent deaths are blamed on the dead of the war, the "forgotten of God." The truth remains to be seen, since this opening installment restricts itself to establishing the setting and the mood. The mood is ominous and antiwar, which some readers may have thought appropriate for the moment:

"What I can't understand is what induced all these soldiers to throw their lives away as they did. What nullified their instinct for self-preservation and induced them to come out here and die in droves like herds of butchered cattle?"
"They died for France," the girl said.
He snapped, "What did the Germans die for? The British? The Americans? What? For the Kaiser? For King and Country? For Democracy? Don't you see those are just a lot of words?
"They are ideals," the girl said quietly, "I think the thousands who gave their lives in the World War did it because they thought it would make a better world for humanity to live in.
"Who's humanity?" he gestured impatiently, "Humanity, dear lady, is you and I. Well, do we thank those fellows who bled to death out here for us? We give them two minutes of silence every year on Armistice Day -- is that gratitude? But today we're falling for the same same old stock words and blah. Shouting the same empty phrases. Sharpening our weapons to make the same old mistakes. I don't wonder the peasants around here think these dead are turning over in their graves."

This should be interesting reading in the weeks to come. As for this week, if Roscoe is plainly antiwar, Robert Carse implicitly takes the other side in his historical tale, "Puritan's Progress." His Protestant hero is rescued at sea by the French who use him against the Spaniards, and he later rescues the French from a renegade in their own ranks who allies with buccaneers to take power for himself. The moral? While Puritans or Pilgrims historically fled from oppression, at least in American history, Carse's hero learns that "A man dare not flee from ferocity and tyranny; he must face them, fight them, and conquer." As an action story, this one's all right, though it has a slightly silly climax in which the imprisoned hero takes solace by reading an old, heavy Bible until his reading gives him the arm strength to overcome his personal oppressor. We needn't read any religious significance into this, however; any big book would do for the purpose.

 

Argosy was one of the most prestigious pulps, one veteran authors aspired to appear in after years of effort. Yet the editors boast this week of featuring three new authors, two of whom have published nothing anywhere else before. Was this a conscious search for new blood or was it done because novice authors work cheaper? In any event, the neophyte authors are Richard Blaker, whose novelet "Senor Sleight-of-Hand" is his only pulp work (according to the FictionMags Index), George Masselman, whose "Dutch Courage" is the first of five stories to appear in Argosy between now and January 1941, and John Wiggin, a baseball specialist who had already made the slicks earlier this year in Collier's. Blaker's story details the torture of a one-armed prospector in a 19th century banana republic, climaxing with the revealtion of an unlikely deception. Whatever readers thought of the story, Blaker, who had published a novel the previous year, would die (in battle? He appears to have been British) the following year. Masselman teases the butchering of an idealistic colonial official and his girlfriend in the Dutch East Indies, only to surprise readers with a favorable native reception to their humane policies. Wiggin wrote a baseball story that I didn't bother to read. Meanwhile, veteran contributor Philip Ketchum writes "Storm Over Claybank," with one of the standard western plots: lawman must prevent a lynching. Ketchum's good enough to make it fresh. A better western is Luke Short's serial Hurricane Range, which concludes on an action-packed note this week, while MacIsaac & Harkins' dialect serial River Rogues meanders toward its conclusion next week.

Joining the serial lineup next time will be yet another "modern man wakes up in far future" story, while Ketchum comes back immediately for his latest Bretwalda tale and Donald Barr Chidsey thrills us with a man writing fraudulent checks. Add the Roscoe serial to that and it ought to be an interesting issue overall.

 

TO BE CONTINUED

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, SEPT. 9, 1939

At least one Argonotes letter writer has criticized Arthur Leo Zagat for the racism of his "Tomorrow" series of postapocalyptic adventures, which probably means that more feel the same way, but "The Bright Flag of Tomorrow," the third novella of the series, finds Zagat unrepentant. In this episode he's starting to fill in some details of geography and future history. The enemy that has conquered the United States is the "Asiatic-African Confederation," or "Asafrics" for short. It remains unclear whether the black soldiers against whom our hero Dikar fights are invaders from Africa or African-Americans who've gone over to the invader. As far as we know, however, our heroes are all white. We learn this issue that Dikar and his Bunch were evacuated as children to a mountain in Palisades Park in downstate New York. This surprised me because I'd assumed that these hardy specimens were out in the Midwest or further west. Dikar -- you may recall that the Bunch have all merged their old names into a single title, Dikar having been born Dick Carr, for example -- must decide once and for all whether to keep the Bunch secure on their mountain or to join the Secret Net, the American resistance he discovered in the last story. His mission, should he choose to accept it, is to rescue a resistance leader from a prison convoy taking him to New York City, where he will be executed and hung from the spire of the Empire State Building. No one's going to see him up there, I presume, but it's the thought that counts. Dikar feels responsible for his Bunch above all, but his mate Marilee urges him to take a larger view.

'Sure,' she assured him, 'Sure it will be the end of safety for us. But if we ever do anythin except make beautiful pledges to the Flag an talk about what we're going to do for the Flag and the Country for which it stands, there will be no more safety for us. Today or tomorrow or a year from now, the choice will always be the same, hide here on the Mountain in safety, or go down off the Mountain an say goodbye to safety. You've got to choose sometime, Dikar, an it might as well be now.'

Again, Zagat throws in an occasional "an" in place of "and" to remind us that the Bunch suffer, to some extent, from arrested development. That comes across most quaintly as the gang recites the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, and in the significance attributed to one girl's doing so with her fingers crossed! That's Bessalton, who had been the mate of Dikar's traitorous rival, who was killed in the previous story. Marilee fears that she may prove a traitor, too, but Dikar sways Bessalton by making her remember the childhood trauma of bombing raids and narrow escapes, while the old-timers Dikar rescued last time turn her for good by teaching what I guess is Zagat's moral for his 1939 readers. America fell, they explain, because we did not bother helping other countries when they were attacked. Bessalton is a spokesperson for isolationism, urging the Bunch to stay on their mountain, but she learns that "when we decided to leave the stranger peoples to fight alone, we decided that we, too, would have to fight alone, and doomed ourselves to certain defeat." This persuades Bessalton that "The Mountain is not our home. America is our home. All America." And so the Bunch comes down from the mountain to kill a bunch of black and yellow men and rescue the captive patriot. Along the way they encounter some "Beast-Folk" -- hillbillies, basically, who've survived on their own without joining the resistance yet come around also to the mission of restoring America. Needless to say, "Anothier Stirring Adventure of Dikar and the Bunch Will Appear in the Argosy Soon."

 

Well, you can't top that, but this issue has some good serials and good stories. Luke Short's Hurricane Range is reliably good while the conclusion of Roy S. DeHorn's two-parter Men With No Master manages to make a protracted effort to knock down a heavy door with a primitive cannon surprisingly suspenseful and entertaining. Fred MacIsaac and C. W. Harkins' River Rogues is a bit harder to take, being written in a sort of hillbilly dialect and reading perhaps more racist, in its portrayal of black Americans, than Zagat. The best of the stand-alone stories is Samuel W. Taylor's "Don't Laugh Now," despite a plot that must have been old already. An eccentric scientist and public gadfly with a reputation as a practical joker brazens his way through an authentically perilous situation because he assumes it's all being staged as a practical joke on him. Old the idea may be -- how old I can't say -- but Taylor makes it work by making the main character sufficiently likeable and simply by writing well. Robert W. Cochran contributes "Hero, Remember," which involves a disgraced plastic surgeon, a fugitive, and a pretty female, not to mention romance, renunciation and redemption. Kind of corny but not offensively so. Finally, western writer Bob Obets makes his Argosy debut with "Red Stallion," a tolerably brief piece about a young cowboy falsely accused of abusing horses.

You might think that Arthur Leo Zagat owns the word "Tomorrow" as far the Argosy is concerned, but Thedore Roscoe will prove you wrong next week as he begins a serial about undead soldiers from those European battlefields which, as this issue goes to press, are reawakening with a vengeance. Robert Carse also returns with a tale of Puritans and pirates while Philip Ketchum writes a western as part of another diverse lineup of periods and genres.

TO BE CONTINUED

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, SEPT. 2, 1939

This will be brief because I didn't give myself much time to read this particular issue of the venerable pulp weekly, though all of you can catch up with the whole thing at Unz.org. Sometimes you just have other things on your mind. I did read what are probably the two main stories of the Sept. 2 issue.

While the cover announces a new serial, which is actually only a two-parter, the illustration gives a scene from the lead novelet, E. Hoffman Price's "Guns For Ethiopia." You'll be happy to know that despite Mussolini's invasion in 1935 there was still resistance in that country to Italian occupation. Our hero is an American gunrunner who has to negotiate with a French colonial government and Arab traders to get those guns to Ethiopia. Also at stake, to some extent, is white prestige in the entire continent. At one point, when a French governor is trying to have our hero deported, he explains some of the legal manipulation in play by stating: "It would lower white prestige, you understand, if we had you deported on the testimony of natives."

As it happens, this story set in Africa is less gruesomely racist than one might fear, no doubt because Price sympathizes with the Ethiopians as against both the Italians and the French. He makes some effort to individualize some of the hero's black crew members, who as a group are portrayed as loyal, brave and competent. Most readers should be able to enjoy this exotic adventure story with a clear conscience.

 

 

The serial is Roy S. De Horn's, "Men With No Master," announced as the first of a series starring Robin the medieval bombardier. He's a young scholar-adventurer in 14th century England who falls in with outlaws in the "New Forest" while seeking Wat the Armorer, a famed crafter of weapons. The illustrations make the Masterless Men of the forest look very much like the Merry Men of another Robin from a century or so earlier, but the story is closer to steampunk in its embrace of technology. Among the characters crossing paths in the forest is a Jewish merchant who happens to be carrying a bombard, a device that makes Robin and Wat's fascination with high-powered crossbows look obsolete. That bombard will come in handy in the next (and final) chapter, when Robin and the Masterless Men will have to save Edward the Black Prince from the sort of kidnapping by a fictional villain that seems to be the destiny of historical personages in pulp fiction. The medieval setting suggests that De Horn may have been inspired by Philip Ketchum's ongoing series about the fated axe Bretwalda, which has lingered in medieval times for several stories now. There's even a Wilton in this story, that being the name of Ketchum's dynasty of axe-wielders, though we don't know yet what weapon De Horn's character favors.

Overall, counting the stories I skipped, this looks like a good, diverse issue, including more of Luke Short's western serial Hurricane Range and the second chapter of Fred MacIsaac and C. W. Harkins's River Rogues, a presumably rollicking tale narrated in dialect about swamp boaters. Richard Sale contributes the Navy story "Mosquito" while James A Kirch gives us the baseball tale "Ghost Ball." There's more besides, but obviously I have nothing to say about the rest. Fear not, since I've already read the September 9 issue from cover to cover and will have plenty to say about that, especially considering the cover feature: the next chapter of Arthur Leo Zagat's race-war "Tomorrow" series. That's an attraction all by itself.

TO BE CONTINUED

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, AUG. 19, 1939

I skipped reviewing the August 12 issue of Argosy because, well, it stunk virtually from one end to the other. The August 19 issue is far more interesting and entertaining across the board. Luke Short gets his cover-featured serial Hurricane Range off to a solid start, but I'll save a detailed discussion for another time. At the other end of the magazine, Charles Rice McDowell's sports serial The Ringer comes to an unexpected close as the hero ends up possibly crippled if not mortally injured in a car wreck on the verge of an adult career as a sports coach.  Toward the middle, even Jack Mann's The Ninth Life gets more interesting when Mann's hero "Gees" offers his heterodox opinion on the history of religions:

"It must be obvious that that slaughter of the firstborn of Egypt wasn't the work of the universal Power we are beginning today to recognize as the source and ruler of all life. The real God wouldn't go in for wholesale murder of his creations and bring mourning into thousands of homes just to let a horde of Israelites loose to go and do more wholesale slaughter in their promised land. Oh, no!
"By belief in their Jahveh, the collective belief of many thousands of people, and by sacrifices to him, these same Israelites created an actual Jahveh and gave him tremendous power. And you'll find lots of tales in the Old Testament of how the said Jahveh got angry and ran amok, as long as their collective belief and continual sacrifices kept him strong enough for manifestations."

The serial's premise is that the Egyptian cat-god Sekhmet is kept alive by the worship and sacrifices not just of the mysterious vamp Cleo Kefrah, but by those of a more mysterious, more malevolent other. It's taken three chapters for the plot to really come together but Mann's story may yet redeem its deadly-dull opening chapters.

The stand-alone stories are this week's real highlights. Philip Ketchum's "The Valiant Arm," the latest in his Bretwalda series about the axe linked to the destiny of England, has more than normal interest because it pits the latest wielder of the axe against none other than William "Braveheart" Wallace. It will surprise readers who know the Wallace story only through the Mel Gibson movie first to learn the truth about the Battle of Sterling -- it was a turkey shoot, the Brits picked off as they crossed a bridge -- and then by Ketchum's neutrality between the Scots and the English. His King Edwards isn't the monster of Gibson's film but really a generic monarch, neither good nor wicked, who happens to have an evil advisor, the story's real heavy, who plays Edward (never called "Longshanks") and Wallace against each other in hopes of winning Scotland for himself. Wallace himself is portrayed as a kind of romantic hero or antihero, first encountered in disguise as a blind minstrel who helps the hero early and more unexpectedly later. Ketchum weaves a web of what-might-have-been by introducing a heroine whom the villain hopes to pass off as the "Maid of Norway," an heir to the Scots throne thought dead, and who turns out to be that very person, one who could pacify Scotland and end the war if she didn't prefer her obscurity and our hero's company. Ketchum can't change history, after all.

"The Kiss of the Cobra" is Walter C. Brown's latest Chinatown story. As readers may recall, Argosy has two Chinatown specialists: Brown and Arden X. Pangborn, who writes the Wong Soo stories. Here's the difference: Pangborn writes conventional mystery stories about a small-scale Charlie Chan, an informal Oriental troubleshooter in his neighborhood. Brown, I think, gets closer to the transgressive appeal of the Chinatown genre, because he almost always writes about oppressed underdogs who get away with murder while leaving white cops baffled. He does it again here, as his underdog hero takes up a cop's unwitting suggestion that a pet cobra could be used against an oppressor. The hero figures out an alibi for his snake all by himself, and is safely off to China, albeit to fight the Japs, before the dumb cops are any wiser. While pulp Chinatown has the allure of sheer difference, its lasting appeal must have something to do with the idea that normal American rules don't apply there, yet some sort of justice is served. They're some of the most fascinating, if sometimes also the most repellent stuff you can read in pulps.

Donald Barr Chidsey returns with the novelet "Flaming Acres," the prolific pulpster's most outrageous story yet during our survey. At least it's outrageous by our 21st standards the way the movie Reefer Madness is. In this one an abandoned real estate project is used as a hideout for gangsters growing "Muggles ... Grifo, mari, moota" -- marihuana!

It is known in Africa as Cannabis Sativa, colloquially dogga, choras, Leainba, or, in Morocco, schira. Cannabis Indica, or Indian hemp, comes sometimes in the form of bhang ("cementer of friendship"), a coarse powder; sometimes as gunja ("the laugh mover") in little bundles like tobacco. The Arabic name is hasheesh.
There is also a Cannabis Americana.
The three kinds are essentially the same; yet such is the enchantment distance lends, that people who speak with bated breath of the fabled exotic hasheesh sniff and shrug at the mention of marihuana, which for all they know may be growing right in their own backyard.
For it's a weed. It is not tropical or sub-tropical. It does not demand mountain air or desert aridity. In fact it is not fussy at all, requiring no fertilizer. It will grow practically anywhere. It seeds itself, spreads, multiplies. It is no fancy cultivated growth like the poppy of the erythroxylon coca. It doesn't any more care where it springs than it carew whom it kills. If its principal name happens to be Mexican, this does not cause it to feel any respect for the international boundary. It does at least as much damage north of the Rio Grande as south of that stream. It grows wild. It grows along railroad tracks and in vacant lots. Oh, it's a weed; though unlike most weeds it is not merely ugly but dangerous as well.

This story comes complete with giggling gunmen and other specimens besides:

A pudgy thing with a charlotte russe face bobbed smirkingly. It was about twenty years old and looked as though a breath of fresh air would kill it.
"Come in, buddy! Come in! You want a smoke?"
There were four other critters besides this worm, three of them horizontal, two completely out of the picture. One dragged very slowly at a cigarette as though it hurt him. He stared at the ceiling. But the upright one was chockful of animation. He drummed his fingers on the table at which he sat, chuckled and sang. When he saw Fred he counced up and down happily.
"Oh goody-goody! Company! [...] Sit down, sweetheart, and I'll buy you a pill. How'd you cut your head? Ta-ta-ti-ta! Look, you take the two low parts and I'll take the high parts and I'll be in Scotland before you. I'll do the orchestra accompaniment besides. All set? It's the quartet from Rigoletto. At least I think that's what it is. You'll recognize it anyway, once we get started."

Add to all this a dramatic scene in which the hero is buried alive in a truckload of pot plants and Flaming Acres is right! From the vantage of 75 years later Chidsey's story may be more camp than pulp, but it's bound to entertain one way or the other.

Rounding out the issue is "Crying Hound," a hunting story by Jim Kjelgaard, and Richard Sale's short story "Benefit Performance." Following closely after Sale's railroad ghost story, you expect something similarly Twilight Zoney when a superannuated Civil War veteran has a mental breakdown after his great-grandson jokingly accuses him of assassinating Abraham Lincoln. Old Abe himself appears before the old man's deathbed to set the record straight, but Sale turns the tables by showing us that Abe is just an actor hired by concerned relatives to reassure the veteran, and that the oldtimer knew this all along. It's a cute note to close on for this week.

I'll have to skip another week simply because I don't have access to the August 26 issue, but this feature will return the following week with yet another Richard Sale story, an E. Hoffman Price tale of the Ethiopian resistance and plenty more where those came from.

TO BE CONTINUED

Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, August 5, 1939

Having hit big by importing British author C. S. Forester and Horatio Hornblower to the U.S., Argosy gives its cover to another British author. At least it may be the first American publication of this author under this particular pseudonym. E. C. Vivian was a veteran author under several names; under the name Jack Mann he began publishing the occult adventures of one Gregory George Gordon Green -- nicknamed "Gees" and presumably pronounced "jeez," -- in 1936. The Ninth Life is the sixth Gees adventure but the first for Argosy. In it, Gees deals with a vamp (in the Theda Bara, not Bela Lugosi sense) who may well be an immortal priestess of Ancient Egypt. The new serial gets the royal treatment of a full-page illustration by someone other than the regular Argosy artist, and the editorial pitch makes it all sound enticingly exotic, but I confess to finding Mann's story and writing pretty dull.

 

Charles Rice McDonnell's The Ringer and Theodore Roscoe's Mother Damnation continue this week, but I found the stand-alone stories more entertaining. Best of the lot is the latest No-Shirt McGee story from Frank Richardson Pierce. In "McGee on Horseback" No-Shirt and his sidekick Bulldozer Craig capture a wild horse and our sourdough hero gets the wild idea of taking the animal down to California to run in big-money stakes races. The fun thing about the story is how it turns on a dime, No-Shirt and Bulldozer abandoning the racing idea to sell a herd of horses to stampeders rushing to the latest gold strike, yet ultimately racing their top animals against some hustlers working the gold camps with a ringer horse. As an added complication one of No-Shirt's cousins, a professional jockey, turns up but is working for the hustlers. Pierce's colloquial present-tense narrative style adds to a sense of spontaneity not often seen in the pulps.

Effective as an action story and interesting as a cultural artifact is E. Hoffman Price's "One Step From Hell." It's set in the American-ruled Philippines, where two years before the Japanese invasion and forty years after the U.S. takeover, American troops still have to deal with hostile Moro bandits (or insurgents) in the back country. The soldier protagonist reluctantly takes a mission to rescue a renegade American "sunshiner" from being tortured to death by the tribesmen. Gin Mike deserves whatever the Moros want to dish out, the soldiers understand, but they can't allow a white man to be killed by the natives, or else the Americans as a whole will lose face.

"Lieutenant, it is prestige, and nothing else, that makes it possible for a handful of white men to keep a semblance of order in the Islands. [a commander explains] Once we lose face, we're finished out here. You're not going out to save Gin Mike.You're going out to maintain a tradition."

Gin Mike "used to be white" in the hero's opinion, and he recovers some of his "whiteness" as he and the hero make their break. The grim irony of the story is that, as Mike seems to redeem himself, he's killed in cold blood by another white man with whom he'd been feuding. "I guess everybody's face is saved," the hero concludes cynically to close this tale from a forgotten period of American colonialism.

Robert Cochran's "Tonight We March" is more like what we'd expect from pulp a few years later, during World War II. A downed American mercenary flier in China is escorted to safety by a brave band of guerrilla fighters, whom he mistakes for bandits, led by a woman nicknamed "White Dove." There's a faint hint of interracial romance as she and he pretend to be husband and wife (he pays alimony to an ex in the States) to trick the Japanese. But the main point is that "China will never die," even though a little American help certainly won't hurt, either. Finally, Richard Sale contributes "Hear Them Whistles Blowing!" a throwaway weird tale of the railroad in which the protagonist, stuck on an out-of-control train with a dead conductor and a broken ankle, seems to see the ghost of Casey Jones coming to his rescue. Next week the serials continue and a crew of sailors battle seal poachers and a submarine in the Arctic Ocean.

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Real Pulp Fiction: ARGOSY, JULY 29, 1939

This might surprise you: three of the stories in this week's issue have to do with drugs, and two of them are set in the 19th century. You may recall that there's a dope-smuggling angle in W. C. Tuttle's Thirty Days for Henry, which wraps up this week. Tuttle's tale of the vaudevillian turned sheriff is the most nearly contemporary story of the three; Henry Harrison Conroy goes to Arizona because vaudeville is dying. It took a long time to die, admittedly, but it was happening sometime in the 20th century. Set sometime earlier -- there are no hints of the 20th century this time -- is C. K. Shaw's western novelet "The Wagon Whelp." In this one a son avenges his freighter father, who he suspects died by sabotage at a rival's hands. In turn, the rival tries to sabotage his victim's son by framing him for dope smuggling; one of his stooges has the young man haul a sack of beans into town, but has put a container of contraband inside. Everything resolves itself by the end, and not without the violence the genre demands.

Unless the editors spilled the beans in an earlier "Argonotes" page, I'd assume that few Argosy readers knew C. K. Shaw's secret. At least I presume it was a secret. That was usually the point of an author going by initials rather than a full name. There wasn't a consistent rule about this, but in this particular case C. K. stood for Chloe Kathleen Shaw. She started getting published around 1925, and her first credit in the Fiction Mags index, an issue of Action Stories, sets the tone. No Ranch Romances or Rangeland Love Stories for Shaw. She did a man's work. "Wagon Whelp" is her Argosy debut; she'd be published there eight times more before the end of 1940, but would stick to western specialty mags for the remainder of her career.

The other story with drug references is the first chapter of the new serial. Jack-of-all-genres Theodore Roscoe goes historical with Mother Damnation, an "Epic of Roaring Days on the Erie Canal." It's set about a generation earlier than Roscoe's Four Corners stories, though we're still in New York State. His subject is the feud between "Bible Bill," a pious and temperamental boatman, and the title character, a Junoesque saloon keeper who attracts crowds by diving into the canal in her red bathing suit. Bible Bill describes Mother Damnation's place as "this white-chimneyed outpost of hell." Roscoe's narrator, a young man working for Bill, explains:

That referred to the old days when certain unlawful dives along the canal used to paint their chimneys white so's the boaters would know where they could get a sniff of cocaine, maybe, or fence stolen goods.

Mother Damnation resents the insinuation. "I run a square game, here; serve drinks at  th' right price; an' I'll have you know there ain't no white chimney on top of it!" This serial is only a three-parter and I'm not exactly sure where Roscoe is going with it, but he always writes well enough to keep me interested.

The main stand-alone story is yet another entry in Philip Ketchum's saga of Bretwalda, the axe linked to the destiny of Britain. "Tribute to None" has a twist that freshens up the formula a little. The hero is a dissident in the reign of King John, but it's his father who wields Bretwalda, albeit under duress, in opposition to his own son. Eventually the lad gets his hand on the axe and uses it on one of John's more obnoxious underlings, and from there it's a hop, skip and jump to Magna Carta. "When the Dyaks Dance" is a preposterous piece of sentimental superstition from James Francis Dwyer, an old-time among pulpsters. He was 65 when this appeared and had been publishing since 1907. A lonely young white trader with a mother fixation falls ill in a Dyak village and is virtually adopted by the village's women, who not only seem to save him by performing a ritual dance but somehow summon a pretty white soulmate for him. Francis Gott gets a chance to play with a less common accent in his sailing story "The Fog's Whiskers." The central character is a rescued Newfoundland sailor who helps the true hero of the tale win a fishing competition with an ambitious rival. The main point of the story seems to be to put a Newfoundland accent in writing. It goes something like this: "Hannibal Spugs be mir name...Dey calls mir Han....Newfunlun' people be gud people!" I suspect many authors enjoyed writing such accents than readers enjoyed reading them. Finally, Robert Neal Leath contributes "Hell Child," which is no horror story unless the prospect of a spoiled child star scares you. The title moppet is the tyrant of the studio, guilt-tripping a long-suffering mother and playing dangerous practical jokes on the crew until a once-timid actor-turned-director puts his foot down out of love for the still-young, still-pretty mother. Before I go, I owe a shout-out across 75 years to George Lane of Rockford IL, who calls out Arthur Leo Zagat for the "petty racism" in his "Tomorrow" stories. "I read the Argosy for my mental 'dessert," Lane writes, "and it puts a bad taste in it to have jingo-journalism mixed with it." His comments may well provoke a controversy -- Argosy readers were an argumentative lot. I'll let you know if anyone comes to Zagat's defense.

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