Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, August 27, 1938

I'm not a big fan of giant floating head covers, but this one by Emmett Watson isn't bad. Rather atmospheric, in fact. As always with ARGOSY, this issue has some good authors inside: Donald Barr Chidsey, Bennett Foster, Richard Howells Watkins, Howard Rigsby (best remembered for paperbacks written under that name and as by Vechel Howard), and Robert E. Pinkerton, as well as the lesser-known Frances Shelley Wees, C.F. Kearns, and John Randolph Phillips. The stories by Chidsey, Foster, and Wees are serial installments, also common in ARGOSY. "Lost House" by Wees was published in hardcover by Macrae in 1938. "Cut Loose Your Wolf" by Foster was published in hardcover as TURN LOOSE YOUR WOLF by Jefferson House in 1938. I think the original title is better. And Chidsey's "Midas of the Mountains" was only a three-parter, probably closer to a novella than an actual novel, and as far as I know, it's never been reprinted. 

Review: The Albino Ogre - Anthony M. Rud (Argosy All-Story Weekly, November 3, 1928)

Pulp author and editor Anthony M. Rud is almost forgotten today, other than maybe for the fact that his novella “Ooze” was the cover-featured story on the very first issue of WEIRD TALES. I admire him because he worked in a number of different genres and was a pretty solid author in all of them.

His novella “The Albino Ogre” is the cover story on the November 3, 1928 issue of ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY, said cover being painted by Howard Brown. It’s a South Seas adventure, all right, just as the cover copy claims. The tale is narrated by an American named Spark Starke (terrible name), a former boxer who is on the run from a murder charge because he killed a guy (unintentionally) in the ring. He falls in with Denmark Ordway Treleaven, a British secret agent of some sort who is in love with Jessie Seagrue, the beautiful owner of a copra plantation whose beautiful redheaded niece Pat O’Hearn also lives with her. Got all that? Den Treleaven wants to save Jessie from the clutches of Pappas the Pink, a giant albino pirate/slaver who has his sights set on not only Jessie but also the plantation she owns. He enlists Spark to help him in this battle against Pappas, and Spark is more than happy to throw in with him, especially after some of Pappas’s minions try to wipe them out in a machine gun attack. Treleaven’s romance with Jessie is complicated by the fact that she’s married, and Pappas has kidnapped her husband and young son to use as leverage against her.

The whole thing is complicated and, yes, a little silly and melodramatic. But that’s in keeping with the times in which it was written, and Rud makes it work by giving the reader interesting characters and almost non-stop action. Chattering machine guns, savage natives with spears, captures, escapes, rescues, sneaking around the jungle, taking over ships, he throws all that stuff in, and as a long-time pulp adventure reader, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Pappas even gets more character development than most despicable villains, and I kind of wish we’d learned more about him.

Speaking of the times in which it was written, “The Albino Ogre” might well offend some readers with modern sensibilities, so consider yourself warned. I’ve never had any trouble accepting fiction for what it is and when it was written, so it didn’t bother me. There’s an inexpensive e-book edition of this available on Amazon, and you can find it for free on-line as well, if you know where to look. It’s the sort of story that H. Bedford-Jones did so well (although HB-J was a considerably better writer than Rud, if I’m being honest) and I had a good time reading it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, December 30, 1939

By the end of the Thirties, ARGOSY was wrapping up its run as one of the top pulps in the business. It would still publish plenty of excellent fiction for another decade, but it wasn't as strong overall as it was at its peak in the mid-Thirties. Despite that trend, this looks like a really strong issue with a good cover by Rudolph Belarski and stories by E. Hoffmann Price, Eustace L. Adams, Allan Vaughan Elston, Louis C. Goldsmith, Bennett Foster, Frank Richardson Pierce, and an installment of one of the occult detective novels by Jack Mann (E. Charles Vivian). Those are some fine writers. I need to read those Jack Mann novels. 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: "I Was the Kid With the Drum" - Theodore Roscoe (ARGOSY, October 30, 1937)

Theodore Roscoe is probably best known (among those of us who remember him at all) for a fine series of French Foreign Legion stories about an old Legionnaire named Thibault Corday. These ran in the pulp ARGOSY during the Thirties.

But Roscoe wrote a lot of other things for ARGOSY besides Foreign Legion yarns, among them this novelette that takes place in a small upstate New York town called Four Corners, during the early days of the Twentieth Century. That’s such a striking cover image (by Emmett Watson, by the way) that it makes me wonder if the editor at ARGOSY had the cover painting to start with and asked Roscoe to write a story around it. Despite the words “Mystery Novelet” on the cover, you look at that Norman Rockwell-esque picture and expect some lazy, gentle piece of Americana from bygone years, don’t you? Sort of like a visit to Mayberry, only from an even earlier era, right?

And that’s what you get . . . if Andy and Opie had to solve a particularly gruesome case of murder involving spiritualism, adultery, a bass drum, and a dead cat.

“I Was the Kid With the Drum!” is one of the weirdest concoctions I’ve read in a while. It’s narrated in Huckleberry Finn-like fashion by Bud Whittier, the twelve-year-old son of Four Corners’ sheriff. One night while he’s getting into mischief where he’s not supposed to be, behind one of the town’s spookiest old houses, he discovers the bass drum that belongs to the drummer from the town’s band playing by itself. The next day, the drummer’s wife turns up missing. More strange stuff happens, mixed in with the preparations for the big marching band contest among the towns in the area that will take place at the Labor Day County Fair. Bud’s job is to help the drummer carry the big drum, but he’s more interested in playing detective.

If you read this story, you’ll think that you have everything figured out pretty early on, but Roscoe is mighty tricky. He throws a lot of plot twists into approximately 15,000 words, and this is one of those stories where you’ll look back and see that all the clues were there, only Roscoe was slick enough to slip some of them right past the reader. He slipped them past me, anyway, and came up with a really entertaining and satisfying tale. The writing is a little old-fashioned in places, but you have to expect that in a story written nearly 75 years ago.

Now, I understand that you can’t just run out and pick up a copy of the October 30, 1937 issue of ARGOSY on my say-so. But you don't have to, because since this post was published originally in a somewhat different form on January 24, 2010, Altus Press has reprinted "I Was the Kid With the Drum" and the other Four Corners stories in two handsome trade paperbacks, as well as an e-book edition of the first volume. I have these and really need to get around to reading them, although I'll have to reread "I Was the Kid With the Drum" first. Altus Press has a number of other collections of Roscoe's pulp fiction, including the Thibault Corday stories, and even though I haven't read all of them, I don't hesitate to recommend them. Roscoe was always worth reading.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, April 21, 1934

I haven't featured an issue of ARGOSY in a while, and this one sports a nice dramatic cover by Paul Stahr, whose covers I nearly always enjoy. As usual, there are some fine writers inside this issue: Erle Stanley Gardner, Max Brand, Fred MacIsaac, J.D. Newsom, Karl Detzer, and the lesser-known Anson Hatch and Howard Ellis Davis. The Brand, MacIsaac, and Detzer stories are all serial installments, but if I had a copy of this one (I don't) I'd be happy to read the novelettes by Gardner and Newsom.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, April 20, 1940

A dramatic cover by Rudolph Belarski graces this issue of ARGOSY. I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that snakes show up fairly often in Belarski's covers. I may have to investigate this. As always, there are some excellent writers in this issue: Theodore Roscoe, Charles Marquis Warren, Jack Byrne, Chandler Whipple, Kenneth Perkins, and one I'm not familiar with, Robert W. Cochran. Although the serials can drive a reader crazy, ARGOSY was certainly one of the great pulps.

A Rough Edges Rerun: The Phantom Spy - Max Brand (Frederick Faust)

Instead of one of the Westerns for which Max Brand (Frederick Faust) is most famous, I’m writing about one of Faust’s espionage novels. THE PHANTOM SPY is set in Europe in the mid-Thirties, the era during which it was written. This isn’t a Ruritanian, Graustarkian, comic opera Europe, either. It’s the real thing, with the grim threat of Hitler’s growing power in Germany looming over everything. In Faust’s novel, however, Hitler isn’t even the real menace. The true villains are an international cabal of warmongers who think that Hitler isn’t moving fast enough and want him to go ahead and invade France right away. To further that end, they’ve managed to steal the plans for the Maginot Line and intend to present them to Hitler so that Germany can attack France’s defensive fortifications at their weakest points. (In reality, the Maginot Line didn’t pose much of an obstacle to the Germans a few years later, but Faust had no way of knowing that.) The British Secret Service sets out to steal the plans back before Hitler gets his hands on them, and the agent entrusted with the job is Lady Cecil de Waters, a British noblewoman who has offered her services as a “talented amateur” in the espionage game. (Yes, Emma Peel without John Steed is exactly what I mean.)

Giving Lady Cecil a hand is a would-be suitor of hers, wisecracking millionaire American playboy Willie Gloster, as well as a mysterious phantom spy known only as Monsieur Jacquelin who turns up when he’s most needed. Faust keeps the action moving along briskly as the characters take turns stealing the plans back and forth from each other, and in the process Willie and Lady Cecil uncover the plotters pulling the strings behind the scenes. Sometimes in his Westerns, Faust can get a little flowery and long-winded in his prose, but not here. This one cooks along in a breezy, hardboiled fashion with double- and triple-crosses, characters pretending to be other characters, fistfights and shootouts, and only occasional pauses for reflection. There aren’t many real twists to the plot – really, if you don’t figure out the true identity of the Phantom Spy early on, like when the character first appears, I’ll be surprised – but that doesn’t matter much because Faust is having so much fun, and so is the reader.

THE PHANTOM SPY first appeared as a serial in the pulp ARGOSY in 1937, under the title “War For Sale”. It was reprinted in hardback by Dodd, Mead in 1973 and then in paperback by Pocket Books in 1975, when Pocket reprinted a number of Faust’s non-Western novels. Both of those editions are available pretty inexpensively on-line. As much as I enjoy Faust’s Westerns, I’d really like to see more of his non-Westerns reprinted, especially some of the pulp serials that have never been published in book form. I believe he wrote a Revolutionary War novel that’s never been reprinted, and I’d love to read that one. There are several pirate novels, too, as well as numerous mysteries and contemporary adventures. If you’ve only read Faust’s Westerns, or if you’ve never read his work at all, give THE PHANTOM SPY a try. I really enjoyed it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 3, 2009. Since then, a number of Faust's non-Western novels have been reprinted, and I really need to get around to reading them.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, December 2, 1939

I'm pretty sure I've read this issue of ARGOSY, but it was at least twenty years ago, probably longer, and I don't recall anything about it except the nice Rudolph Belarski cover and that I really enjoyed Frank Richardson Pierce's timber novella. Pierce was just about the best at that kind of yarn. Also in this issue are stories by Jim Kjelgaard, Carl Rathjen, Alexander Key, and Robert W. Cochran, plus serial installments by Robert Carse, Johnston McCulley, and Jonathan Stagge (actually the same guys who wrote mysteries under the pseudonyms Patrick Quentin and Q. Patrick, at least part of the time; who wrote what under those names is pretty complicated). ARGOSY always had great covers and great writers. If it just weren't for all those blasted serials . . .   

The Deathly Island - H. Bedford-Jones

This action-packed novelette by H. Bedford-Jones, originally published in the October 20, 1934 issue of ARGOSY might just be the perfect mental palette-cleanser between novels. “The Deathly Island” refers to an island off the tip of Madagascar where a beautiful young woman is being held prisoner at her late father’s palatial estate. Sea captain Charles Stuart, our stalwart hero, discovers not only her plight but also the fact that his estranged brother is mixed up in the scheme that’s caught the girl in its snare. What’s a pulp hero to do but set out to put things right?

Not content to leave it at that, Bedford-Jones also mixes into the plot a truly despicable villain, a fortune in rare pearls, and a looming hurricane. The result is five chapters of action, suspense, and excitement rendered in the author’s usual clean prose with a cool, tough, hardboiled tone. The novelette length of “The Deathly Island” keeps Bedford-Jones from bringing in too many complications or going into too much depth with his characters, but the whole thing races along with such zest that it’s pure fun to read. If you’ve never sampled HB-J’s work, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start. And if you’re already a fan, I can almost guarantee that you’ll enjoy it. You can find it on-line, and I give it a high recommendation.

Forgotten Books: The Python Pit - George F. Worts

I wouldn’t have guessed that it’s been more than ten years since I read, enjoyed, and blogged about SOUTH OF SULU, the first collection of George F. Worts’ Singapore Sammy stories from Black Dog Books. It seems more recent than that, and the stories are still pretty fresh in my memory, which means they were good ones, I guess. Now I’ve read THE PYTHON PIT, the second Singapore Sammy collection, also published by Black Dog Books, and thoroughly enjoyed it as well.

Singapore Sammy is really Samuel Larkin Shay, red-headed American adventurer in southeast Asia during the 1930s. The character first appeared in 1931 in a series of adventure yarns published in the pulp SHORT STORIES (the ones collected in SOUTH OF SULU). Sammy is searching for his father, a conman named Bill Shay, looking for vengeance because the old man deserted Sammy’s mother, and also because Bill Shay has possession of a will that means Sammy will inherit a fortune if he can get his hands on it.

Later that same year, Worts moved the series over to ARGOSY. The first four stories to appear there are the tales collected in THE PYTHON PIT, starting with “Sapphires and Suckers”, a novella which was serialized in two parts under the title “Singapore Sammy” in the December 12 and December 19, 1931 issues of ARGOSY. It serves as an adequate introduction to the character for anybody who hadn’t read the earlier stories in SHORT STORIES, explaining about Sammy’s quest to find his father. He gets mixed up with a beautiful young woman whose father is a dangerous criminal and who, in partnership with Bill Shay, has sold the young woman’s fiancee a worthless sapphire mine. Or is it worthless? That becomes the question, leading to intrigue, double-dealing, and considerable danger for Sammy. He’s good at staying a couple of steps ahead of everybody else, though . . . except for his father, who always seems to give him the slip.

More than a year passed before Sammy reappeared in the three-part serial “The Python Pit”, in the May 6, 13, and 20, 1933 issues of ARGOSY. At 30,000 words, this is almost a novel. Sammy and his sidekick, Lucifer “Lucky” Jones, reluctantly agree to take a beautiful young woman to the remote island where her father has been mauled by a tiger. The problem is, the island, called Konga, is rumored to be inhabited by a race of gigantic cannibals and haunted by the ghosts of all their victims. They set sail on their schooner, the Blue Goose, anyway. Sammy expects to run into trouble, and that’s what happens, since nothing about the situation is exactly what it appears to be at first. There’s a ton of action in this one, and Sammy comes face to face with Bill Shay again. Worts massages the back-story in this one, revealing that the villainous Shay is actually Sammy’s stepfather (whether that was the intention all along, I don’t know, but I sort of doubt it). He also introduces another recurring character to be a thorn in Sammy’s side, the lovely but treacherous Shanghai Sally. Worts manages to get all this in without ever letting up on the breakneck pace and the vivid writing, which makes “The Python Pit” one of the best pure pulp adventure yarns I’ve read in a long time.

Singapore Sammy next appears in “Isle of the Meteor”, a complete novelette published in the August 19, 1933 issue of ARGOSY. Lucky Jones is off on another adventure when this yarn takes place, so Sammy has to handle all the danger himself when he agrees to help out a dying sea captain and deliver a cargo of supplies to an isolated island where a group of communist-leaning, anti-war Americans established a colony during the Great War (World War I, to us). Of course, when Sammy gets there, surprises are waiting for him, most of them quite perilous, including another encounter with Shanghai Sally. Bill Shay is mentioned in this one but doesn’t appear. It’s a good, fast-moving tale with some particularly brutal scenes near the end.

The final story in this volume is “A Whisker of Buddha”, originally published as “Buddha’s Whisker” in the May 26, 1934 issue of ARGOSY. Sammy is in bad shape when this one opens, having had ownership of the Blue Goose stolen out from under him and Lucky Jones while he was drugged, by none other than Shanghai Sally, of course. He wakes up in Rangoon, in a fog from the mickey Sally slipped him, but then some of the local criminals start approaching him, wanting to hire him for a big job. This tells Sammy something big is up, so he finds Lucky and before you know it, they’re up to their necks in an adventure that involves infiltrating a secret ceremony that can get them killed and stealing a small, jewel-encrusted chest that’s supposed to contain an authentic hair from Buddha’s beard. This is the weakest story in the collection because it takes a while to get going, but once it does it’s pretty darned good, with lots of exciting scenes.

It also lays the groundwork for the next story, the only full-length novel in the series, THE MONSTER OF THE LAGOON, which I also happen to have in reprint. As much as I enjoyed THE PYTHON PIT, I’ll probably get to it fairly soon.

Forgotten Books: Marching Sands - Harold Lamb

I haven't read a lot of Harold Lamb's work. The novel DURANDEL and a few short stories, that's all I remember. But I've just read his early novel MARCHING SANDS, which was serialized in the pulp ARGOSY in October and November 1919, and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I'm a sucker for lost race and lost city stories, and MARCHING SANDS is both. Former army captain Robert Gray is hired by an American scientific society to lead an expedition into the wilds of the Gobi Desert, in the hope of finding a mysterious lost race called the Wusun, who supposedly live in a city known as Sungan, which may or may not have been swallowed up by the shifting sands of the desert. A British expedition is searching for Sungan and the Wusun at the same time, and the Americans want Gray to get there first, even though there's really nothing at stake but prestige.

The Chinese authorities have their own reasons for wanting both expeditions to fail, so Gray finds himself in all sorts of trouble once he sets out for his mysterious destination. There are lurking killers who can handle rifles but leave tracks in the sand like wild camels.  There are knife-wielding priests.  There are supposed allies who may be waiting for the right moment to betray him.

And then of course, there's a beautiful redheaded girl, the niece of the explorer leading the British expedition.

This is an old-fashioned high adventure novel, the sort of thing that H. Bedford-Jones wrote so well. Lamb's writing isn't as polished as that of HB-J, at least at this stage of his career, but MARCHING SANDS is still a very entertaining yarn. Robert Gray is a likable hero, Mary Hastings (the beautiful redhead) is a fine heroine, and the scrapes they get into are frequent and exciting. Lamb does a good job of layering in the surprises in his plot and weaves everything together into a thrilling climax.

MARCHING SANDS is a little creaky in places, no doubt about that, but what would you expect in a novel written more than 90 years ago? I had a great time reading it, and it's not completely forgotten. Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books has reprinted it in both a print edition and a new e-book edition. The Amazon link for the e-book is below, and if you'd prefer the print version the best way to get it is to order it through the Black Dog Books website. I'll definitely be reading more of Harold Lamb's work. 

"The Whip" - Robert Carse (ARGOSY, Oct. 30, 1937)

This is another story from the October 30, 1937 issue of ARGOSY. Robert Carse was a prolific author for the pulps and later on turned out quite a few paperback historical novels, as well as the novelization of the movie MORGAN THE PIRATE, which I didn’t think was very good. Carse’s specialty in ARGOSY was the French Foreign Legion story, and “The Whip” is a top-notch example, a ripping yarn if there ever was one.

The Whip of the title isn’t an actual whip, but rather the name of a group of Hungarian terrorists who are out to overthrow the king in the years following World War I. They set up an assassination attempt, but the young man chosen to perform the killing has an attack of morals at the last minute and backs out, so the king survives and the young man has to go on the run to escape the vengeance of his former comrades in The Whip. He figures he can spend the rest of his life hiding in the French Foreign Legion.

Well, you don’t have to have read much adventure fiction to know that sooner or later, our hero’s past is going to catch up to him, in the person of his former friend who is now the deadliest assassin in Europe. But the fact that “The Whip” is somewhat predictable doesn’t detract too much from the entertaining nature of this story. Carse’s prose is lean and tough enough that it could have almost been written yesterday, without any of the supposed purple prose the pulps were famous for. (And that purple prose was never as prevalent in the pulps as their detractors made it out to be, for that matter.) “The Whip” is a fine story, and it, along with Theodore Roscoe’s “I Was the Kid With the Drum”, make this issue of ARGOSY a definite keeper if you ever run across it.

As for the rest of the issue, well, ARGOSY is somewhat problematic for a reader today because of all the serials that ran in the magazine. There are installments of three serials in this issue: a Northern by Frank Richardson Pierce, one of the top authors in that genre; a sports yarn by Judson Philips, who wrote a lot of those before becoming much better known as a mystery author under his own name and the pseudonym Hugh Pentecost; and the concluding installment of a novel about Sheriff Henry Harrison Conroy (think W.C. Fields in the Old West) by one of my favorites, W.C. Tuttle. Good stuff, I’m sure, but I didn’t read any of them because I don’t have the other installments. There’s a horse racing story by Richard Sale (normally a dependable author, but I didn’t care for this one); a story by David Gardner about drilling gas wells that’s okay; a comedy about a magician by Edgar Franklin, a long-time contributor to ARGOSY; and a short-short humorous crime story by the inelegantly named Nard Jones, who went on to write at least one Gold Medal novel in the Fifties. None of the shorts are particularly memorable.

But the stories by Roscoe and Carse are well worth your time and make this issue worth picking up. This is the first issue of ARGOSY I’ve read in a while, but you can bet I’ll be sampling more of them soon.

"I Was the Kid With the Drum" -- Theodore Roscoe (ARGOSY, Oct. 30, 1937)

Theodore Roscoe is probably best known (among those of us who remember him at all) for a fine series of French Foreign Legion stories about an old Legionnaire named Thibault Corday. These ran in the pulp ARGOSY during the Thirties, and a few of them were collected in a small press volume called TOUGHEST IN THE LEGION back in the Eighties.

But Roscoe wrote a lot of other things for ARGOSY besides Foreign Legion yarns, among them this novelette that takes place in a small upstate New York town called Four Corners, during the early days of the Twentieth Century. That’s such a striking cover image (by Emmett Watson, by the way) that it makes me wonder if the editor at ARGOSY had the cover painting to start with and asked Roscoe to write a story around it. Despite the words “Mystery Novelet” on the cover, you look at that Norman Rockwell-esque picture and expect some lazy, gentle piece of Americana from bygone years, don’t you? Sort of like a visit to Mayberry, only from an even earlier era, right?

And that’s what you get . . . if Andy and Opie had to solve a particularly gruesome case of murder involving spiritualism, adultery, a bass drum, and a dead cat.

“I Was the Kid With the Drum!” is one of the weirdest concoctions I’ve read in a while. It’s narrated in Huckleberry Finn-like fashion by Bud Whittier, the twelve-year-old son of Four Corners’ sheriff. One night while he’s getting into mischief where he’s not supposed to be, behind one of the town’s spookiest old houses, he discovers the bass drum that belongs to the drummer from the town’s band playing by itself. The next day, the drummer’s wife turns up missing. More strange stuff happens, mixed in with the preparations for the big marching band contest among the towns in the area that will take place at the Labor Day County Fair. Bud’s job is to help the drummer carry the big drum, but he’s more interested in playing detective.

If you read this story, you’ll think that you have everything figured out pretty early on, but Roscoe is mighty tricky. He throws a lot of plot twists into approximately 15,000 words, and this is one of those stories where you’ll look back and see that all the clues were there, only Roscoe was slick enough to slip some of them right past the reader. He slipped them past me, anyway, and came up with a really entertaining and satisfying tale. The writing is a little old-fashioned in places, but you have to expect that in a story written nearly 75 years ago.

Now, I understand that you can’t just run out and pick up a copy of the October 30, 1937 issue of ARGOSY on my say-so. But if you already have that issue in your pulp collection and haven’t read it yet, my recommendation is that you do so. Or if you happen to run across a copy in a flea market or an antique mall or at a pulp show and remember that distinctive cover painting, grab that sucker if it’s not priced too high. I’m going to be reading the other stories in it and will probably have a few words about them in due time.