Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All-Story Detective, December 1949

ALL-STORY DETECTIVE was a short-lived Popular Publications detective pulp that ran for six issues in the late Forties. This was the last issue under that title. The magazine became 15 STORY DETECTIVE but managed only eight issues under that title. But many of the covers were by Norman Saunders, including this "What the heck is going on here?" number, and there were some good authors in its pages. In this issue, those authors include Frederick C. Davis, Bryce Walton, Bruce Cassiday, and Stuart Friedman, as well as lesser-known authors Robert Carlton, Ed Barcelo, and Robert F. Toombs. Like most of the short-run pulps, I'm sure many of the stories were good and the magazines failed for other reasons.

Review: Hero Stuff - Frederick C. Davis (WINGS, February 1928)

The Age of Aces website recently posted the short story “Hero Stuff” by Frederick C. Davis. Since Davis is one of my favorite pulp authors, I went ahead and read it. This is from the February 1928 issue of the aviation pulp WINGS. According to the Fictionmags Index, it’s the first of 20 stories featuring high-flying, two-fisted newsreel cameraman/pilot Nick Royce. In reading the story, it seemed to me like there might have been another one that came before it, and since this was in the second issue of WINGS, I suspect that Davis may have created Nick Royce specifically for the magazine’s debut issue and continued with him for a while. But lacking a copy of the January 1928 issue, there’s no way for me to confirm that, of course. Pure speculation on my part.

At any rate, “Hero Stuff” is narrated by Art Buckley, the head of the aerial unit for the World News Reel Company, an outfit that flies out of an airfield located on Long Island. As this story opens, the head of the company arrives with an unexpected guest: a matinee idol from Hollywood who’s starring in a new flying picture set during the Great War. The movie is all in the can except for one stunt, and the World News Reel’s pilots are going to help the star and the picture’s director pull it off. It involves the plane being flown by the star going into a tailspin, causing him to have to bail out over No Man’s Land. There’s considerable risk to the parachute stunt, which the star is going to perform himself. But he needs somebody to actually fly the plane, and that’s the job Nick Royce gets.

Unfortunately, Nick’s vixenish girlfriend is also on hand, and the Hollywood star makes a play for her. This leads to considerable friction and even some fisticuffs between the two men whose lives will be entwined once they’re thousands of feet in the air in a canvas-and-wood crate.

“Hero Stuff” is well-written, as you’d expect from Davis, and he keeps things moving along briskly with touches of humor and action and danger. I really enjoyed this yarn. It’s no lost classic, but I found it very entertaining, enough so that I’d love to see somebody do a complete collection of the Nick Royce stories. I’d be happy to read more of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, August 1935

This issue of DETECTIVE TALES starts off with a good, dramatic cover by Walter Baumhofer and has a strong line-up of authors inside: top pulpsters Frederick C. Davis, Norvell Page, Paul Ernst, Wyatt Blassingame, Franklin H. Martin, J. Lane Linklater, R.T.M. Scott, and George Armin Shaftel (once as himself and once under the pseudonym George Rosenberg), plus lesser-known George Edson and Wilton Hazzard along with house-name Emerson Graves. Davis, Page, Blassingame, and Ernst would make this pulp well worth reading for me if I owned a copy, which I don't.

Operator 5 #5: Cavern of the Damned - Curtis Steele (Frederick C. Davis)

The temple of a sinister cult hidden in the middle of Manhattan! A vicious Tibetan prince whipping a beautiful girl almost to death! Influential figures falling under the sway of plotters who want to take over the country! Who can possibly deal with this terrible menace? You know the answer to that as well as I do: Jimmy Christoper, also known as Operator 5, the ace of the American Intelligence Service. Only Operator 5 can possibly thwart this impending catastrophe aimed at the destruction of all regular religions and the takeover of the United States.

But what’s that? Operator 5 is accused of treason and stripped of his standing in the Intelligence Service. All the other operators are tasked with finding and arresting him, and if he puts up a fight, Jimmy Christopher will be gunned down like any other criminal!

Yep, things look pretty bad in “Cavern of the Damned”, the fifth Operator 5 novel that was published originally in the August 1934 issue of the iconic pulp OPERATOR #5. Every issue, author Frederick C. Davis, writing under the house-name Curtis Steele, came up with a new menace to threaten the entire country that only Operator 5 could defeat. This time, the threat posed by the Cult of Zavaa has definite Weird Menace overtones with its hidden temples, robed and turbaned priests and acolytes, and brutal whippings. Davis wrote for numerous different pulps, including the Weird Menace titles, so he certainly knew his way around that genre and utilizes those elements to good effect in this novel.

All the other trademarks of the Operator 5 series are here: Jimmy Christopher has an able assistant in the stalwart Irish lad Tim Donovan. He even takes a break to demonstrate a magic trick for Tim, as he usually does. Beautiful reporter Diane Elliott gets captured by the villains. Jimmy Christopher’s beautiful twin sister Nan is on hand but doesn’t have much to do in this one. Jimmy Christopher’s semi-invalid, retired intelligence agent father lends him a hand, too. The climaxes of Davis’s Operator 5 novels often border on the apocalyptic, and while he reins in that tendency a little this time, the final showdown features plenty of blood and thunder (and lepers).

I love this series because Davis was a fine writer and usually followed my motto when writing about Jimmy Christopher’s adventures: “If you’re going over the top anyway, you might as well go ‘way over.” That said, while I had a very good time reading this novel, I didn’t find it quite as appealing as some of the others in the series. I think I prefer the ones where there’s some sort of super-scientific weapon and a hidden mastermind threatening the nation, rather than a bunch of mostly nameless, faceless guys in robes and turbans who slink around getting folks hooked on hashish, which Davis nearly always refers to as “bhang!”, with the exclamation mark. After a while, I was glad I wasn’t playing a drinking game that involved references to bhang! I’d have been drunk for sure.

If you’ve never tried this series, “Cavern of the Damned” probably isn’t one you’d want to start with. If you’re already an Operator 5 fan and haven’t read this one, don’t let anything I’ve said here influence you not to read it. It’s great fun. Doing Operator 5 as a Weird Menace yarn is just a slight misstep, that’s all. It’s been reprinted several times over the years and is available currently in a very nice trade paperback edition from Altus Press.

The Spider: The Hangman From Hell - Will Murray

As I’ve mentioned before, I have vivid memories of how I discovered both The Spider and Operator 5: I bought the first two Berkley reprints of The Spider, THE SPIDER STRIKES! and THE WHEEL OF DEATH, both by R.T.M. Scott, when they were packaged together in a buy-one-get-one-free deal, off the paperback spinner rack at a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas, where we always stopped when my parents were going to visit relatives in Blanket, Zephyr, and Brownwood. I picked up the Corinth Regency paperback reprint of the Operator 5 novel LEGIONS OF THE DEATH MASTER (by Frederick C. Davis writing under the house name Curtis Steele) off the spinner rack in Trammell’s Pak-a-Bag Grocery in downtown Azle. (Several times a week, I drive by the building where Trammell’s used to be. It’s now a Mexican restaurant, and whenever I go in there, I can look over in the bar area and see the exact spot that spinner rack used to stand.)

But I digress, as the saying goes. You know you can’t get a straight review from me without a healthy dose of nostalgia accompanying it. So, to get to why we’re all here today . . . THE HANGMAN FROM HELL is the latest novel from Will Murray teaming up the iconic pulp heroes The Spider and Operator 5, and man, is it good! One of Richard Wentworth’s associates who keeps an eye on crime in Europe for him comes to New York with some important information. But when Wentworth meets the ship he’s traveling on, he finds that his informant has been murdered. Then Wentworth’s assistant Ram Singh is attacked and nearly killed by a giant attacker wielding a hangman’s noose attached to a razor-sharp sickle. Wentworth’s investigation reveals that this attacker, a deadly assassin known as The Hangman, works for the burgeoning political terror group known as the Purple Shirts, and he’s come to the United States for the specific purpose of killing Operator 5, America’s top secret intelligence ace.

Wentworth and Jimmy Christopher, Operator 5’s real name, have crossed paths before and an uneasy truce exists between them. They usually have the same goal but much different methods in achieving it. Operator 5, as a government agent, has to stay within the law (mostly) while Wentworth, as the vigilante known as The Spider, takes the law into his own hands and metes out what he considers justice without hesitation. It's an explosive relationship as both of them try to track down the Hangman and find out the details of the terrible scheme the Purple Shirts are planning to coincide with a big rally in Central Park.

There’s not quite as much breakneck action in this novel as there’s been in previous Spider novels by Murray, but the investigation by our two heroes plays out with compelling urgency, and when violence does erupt, it's packed with the apocalyptic excitement that’s a trademark of the Spider yarns going back to Norvell Page, the principal author of the series back in its pulp days. Page came up with some great murder methods for his villains to use, but Murray goes him one better in this novel: the attack on New York by the Purple Shirts is one of the most ghastly I’ve encountered in pulp adventure fiction. It’s truly creepy stuff, but it’s also very effective in raising the stakes and making the reader root for Wentworth and Jimmy Christopher even more.

I also like the way Murray ties this novel in with several of the original novels from both series. It fits perfectly and naturally and there’s never a sense of it being forced into canon. This is the way to write new novels based on classic pulp series, which, of course, is exactly what you’d expect from Will Murray.

I had a great time reading THE HANGMAN FROM HELL, as you’d expect since I’m a big fan of both The Spider and Operator 5. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year and I give it a very high recommendation. And it’s put me in the mood to read some of the original pulp novels again. Whether I’ll get around to it, we’ll have to wait and see. But if I do, you’ll read the reviews here, as usual.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, May 1935

You never know what you're going to find in a sarcophagus, as Rafael DeSoto illustrates on this cover. Over the years I've read quite a few stories that first appeared in TEN DETECTIVE ACES, but I've never read or even owned an actual issue of the pulp. Plenty of fine fiction appeared there. Authors in this issue include Frederick C. Davis (with a Moon Man story), Paul Chadwick (with a Wade Hammond story), Emile C. Tepperman (with a Marty Quade story), Tepperman again as Anthony Clemens (with a Val Easton story), Joe Archibald (with a Dizzy Duo story), and non-series yarns by Harry Widmer, Margie Harris, and J. Lane Linklater. There are a bunch of issues of this pulp available on the Internet Archive. I ought to read some of them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Street & Smith's Complete Stories, March 15, 1933

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but this H.W. Scott cover features a Mexican vaquero shaking hands with a chimpanzee, right? And what's that in his other hand, a candlestick or some sort of little idol? I don't know what story this illustrates, but I want to read it! Unfortunately, I don't own a copy, but this issue of STREET & SMITH'S COMPLETE STORIES looks like a good one. Authors inside include the great Frederick Nebel, the also great Frederick C. Davis (ghosting a White Wolf story under the name of the series' creator Hal Dunning), Forbes Parkhill, Harry Harrison Kroll, and forgotten pulpsters James Clarke, William Bruner, and Jack Hulick. I'm going to have to see if I can come up with a way to work a vaquero and a chimpanzee into one of my books . . .

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, November 1942

For some reason, I've always liked those TEN DETECTIVE ACES covers with the red borders around them. It's a nice distinctive look. And I always love Norman Saunders covers. This one is no exception. Great action and details and that's a really good-looking woman. The stories inside are by some authors who ain't half-bad, either: Frederick C. Davis, Walker A. Tompkins, Norman A. Daniels, Harold Q. Masur, Joe Archibald, Lee E. Well, Stuart Friedman, plus a couple I hadn't heard of, Ken Kessler and Jimmy O'Brien, plus house name Guy Fleming. A couple of those authors, Tompkins and Wells, are best known as Western writers, but Davis and Archibald wrote quite a few Westerns, too, and Daniels did a few.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, November 1936

That's a nice dramatic cover by an artist I'm not familiar with, William E. Luberoff. TEN DETECTIVE ACES was a solid pulp, although it never reached the heights of BLACK MASK or DIME DETECTIVE. The contents of this issue include stories by top-notch pulpsters such as Frederick C. Davis (a Moon Man story), Philip Ketchum writing as Carl McK. Saunders (a Captain John Murdock story), Roger Torrey, Joe Archibald, and Phil Richards, who I remember from writing the great Kid Calvert series over in WESTERN ACES. Also on hand are the more obscure Robert S. Fenton, Albert Barry, Marion Gailor Squire, and Harry Adler. Albert Barry has only one story in the FMI, and when I see that I always wonder if it was a one-shot house-name, but I'm sure there were plenty of writers who managed one or two sales in their career and that was it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Trails, May 1936

This looks like a pretty good mid-Thirties issue of WESTERN TRAILS, with a cover by William F. Soare and entries in two long-running series, Duke Buckland by Frederick C. Davis and Bert Little by Clyde B. Warden. The other authors on hand are all top-notch pulpsters, as well: Philip Ketchum writing as Carl McK. Saunders, Frank Gruber, James P. Olsen, Peter Germano (as Peter Germane), and Bruce Douglas.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective, June 1936

With the exception of BLACK MASK in the Twenties, I'm not sure there was ever a better detective pulp than DIME DETECTIVE in the Thirties. And DIME DETECTIVE runs BLACK MASK a pretty close second! With Walter Baumhofer as the regular cover artist, you know the magazine was going to look great. This issue has a pretty typical line-up of authors inside: a Cardigan story by Frederick Nebel, a Needle Mike story by William E. Barrett, a Carter Cole story by Frederick C. Davis, a Kip Lacey story by Robert Sidney Bowen, and a stand-alone yarn by Hugh B. Cave. You might find a better bunch of writers than that in some other detective pulp, but not often.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: New Detective Magazine, January 1942

This issue of NEW DETECTIVE MAGAZINE sports a striking cover (I don't know the artist) and features some fine authors: Frederick C. Davis, William R. Cox, Robert Sidney Bowen, Donald G. Carmack, and a few who are unfamiliar to me: Richard L. Hobart, Don Joseph, and John Hawkins. Davis, Cox, and Bowen are enough to make an issue worth reading, though.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Detective Magazine, March 1938

For the last pulp cover post of the year, we have a dandy cover by Walter Baumhofer on one of the iconic pulp magazines, DIME DETECTIVE. Inside this issue, there's a Race Williams story by Carroll John Daly, Raymond Chandler's "The King in Yellow", a Keyhole Kerry story by Frederick C. Davis, and stories by a couple of lesser known writers, William Edward Hayes and Maxwell Hawkins. Baumhofer, Chandler, Daly, and Davis are more than reason enough to think this was a great issue of DIME DETECTIVE. 

Forgotten Books: Thrilling Sky Stories - Frederick C. Davis

 

Over the past few years, Frederick C. Davis has become one of my favorite pulp authors. I’ve always liked his work ever since reading those Corinth paperback reprints of some of his Operator 5 pulp novels, back in the Sixties. I hadn’t really realized how many different genres Davis wrote in, though, until recent years.

THRILLING SKY STORIES is a 2005 small press collection of aviation yarns Davis wrote, including two novellas and a short story. I’ve had it for years but just got around to reading it. The volume opens with the novella “The Sky Pirate”, from the April 1929 issue of AIR STORIES. A mysterious, all-black plane is involved with a series of daring robberies. The thieves strike at a ship at sea, a gold mine in the mountains, and a bank in a San Francisco skyscraper. It’s up to a pair of stalwart, two-fisted Border Patrol pilots to track down the mastermind behind these bizarre crimes, but their investigation has barely started when one of them finds himself framed for a crime he didn’t commit, a twist of fate that turns him against the law, too.

The prose in this yarn from fairly early in Davis’s career isn’t as polished as it would be later, and his plotting is a little weak and driven by too many coincidences . . . but man, the action scenes are great. Also, he was a master at coming up with slam-bang endings where the action continues to the very last paragraph, and he provides a fantastic one here that would have called for some great flying and stunt work if Hollywood had ever made a movie out of this tale. I was really flipping the pages in the last chapter, and any time an author can make me do that, I’ll forgive a lot of other weaknesses. “The Sky Pirate” is a mixed bag, but overall I enjoyed it quite a bit.

“Sky Racketeers”, a novella from the May 1930 issue of WINGS, is exactly what it sounds like, a tale of how gangsters work the ol’ protection racket on an airline. Also as you’d expect, a stalwart, two-fisted pilot gets the job of stopping them, with help from his mechanic sidekick. The plot is a little better in this one, but some of the coincidences still stretch credibility too far. Again, however, the slam-bang ending is great.

This volume wraps up with “Patrol of the Dead”, a short story from the Spring 1937 issue of AIR STORIES. It’s a sequel of sorts to “The Sky Pirate”, featuring the same Border Patrol base and one of the same supporting characters from the earlier story. It’s about the conflict between the Border Patrol and an organization of Mexican drug smugglers (an early day drug cartel, in other words) and is better written and plotted than the other two stories in this book. It lacks the huge climax, but there’s still some good action.

I enjoyed THRILLING SKY STORIES. It’s not a book I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t read Davis’s work before, since it’s not as good as some of his other work, but anyone who’s already a fan, or who just really likes aviation pulp, will get some good entertainment out of it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, June 1944

You know me. Any cover with a sexy redhead on it is going to catch my interest. But in addition, this issue of DETECTIVE TALES features stories by Ray Bradbury, Frederick C. Davis, and Fredric Brown. That's a pretty potent trio of authors! Also on hand are Donald G. Carmack, Francis K. Allan, and a few lesser-known authors. The cover would have made me pick this one up. Bradbury, Davis, and Brown would have made me plunk down my dime.

UPDATE: The cover art is by Gloria Stoll.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Complete Stories, December 15, 1932

Pulp covers loved that bright red and yellow combination. Those are some scary-looking dogs on this cover by H.W. Scott, too. This issue of COMPLETE STORIES has some fine authors in it: Frederick C. Davis with a White Wolf story (ghosted under the name of the late Hal Dunning), George Harmon Coxe, Allan Vaughan Elston, Richard Howells Watkins, C.S. Montanye, Karl Detzer, and a pulpster I'm not familiar with, James Clarke. I've never read an issue of COMPLETE STORIES, but I know it doesn't have the same sort of reputation as the big-name general fiction pulps like ARGOSY, ADVENTURE, and SHORT STORIES. However, judging by the authors this looks like a pretty good issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Lariat Story Magazine, December 1935

That's a pretty dynamic cover by Emery Clarke on this issue of LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE. There are some really excellent writers to be found inside, too: Walt Coburn, Eugene Cunningham, Frederick C. Davis, James P. Olsen, and Theodore A. Tinsley all have stories in this issue, as well as lesser known authors Ralph Condon and Edgar L. Cooper, plus house-name John Starr, who could be any of those guys if you go by the theory that house-names were used when a writer had more than one story in an issue. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that in this case, Starr is probably Olsen or Tinsley, both prolific pulpsters, or possibly Davis. Coburn and Cunningham were big names and an editor wouldn't have wanted to waste a story from either of them by putting a house-name on it. But all that's just speculation on my part. I love the title of Cunningham's yarn, "The Gun-Girl of Murder Mesa".

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dlme Detective, September 15, 1933

We all know that I like lurid pulp covers, and they don't get much more lurid than this one by William Reusswig. This is a pretty heavyweight issue of DIME DETECTIVE with a Cardigan yarn by Frederick Nebel, a Paul Pry story by Erle Stanley Gardner, a stand-alone tale by Frederick C. Davis, and an "Honest" Glen Kelsey (whoever he was) story by Ralph Oppenheim, which based on the title, "Brand of the Beast", appears to be the inspiration for the cover. This was the second and final story in what was a very short-lived series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ace Detective Magazine, August 1936

This is a pretty obscure pulp magazine, but you can't tell that by the top-notch lineup of authors inside: Frederick C. Davis, Steve Fisher, Frederick C. Painton, Norman A. Daniels, Emile C. Tepperman, Dale Clark, and James Perley Hughes. There are some mighty good authors there. I have to confess, I'm not that fond of the cover by J. George Janes, but it's not terrible, just not up to the level of the writers inside.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Gold Seal Detective, April 1936

That's a pretty brutal cover on this issue of GOLD SEAL DETECTIVE, a short-lived pulp that appears to have featured mostly stories about G-Men. The lead novella is part of the Rough 'Em Up Radigan series by "Clark Aiken", who was really Frederick C. Davis, so you know it's got to be pretty good. With five of these novellas running in GOLD SEAL DETECTIVE, I wonder if the series would be a good candidate for reprinting. I don't know about you, but I'd buy THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF ROUGH 'EM UP RADIGAN. Norman A. Daniels is also on hand in this issue, twice, in fact, once as himself and once as David A. Norman. James Perley Hughes and Darrell Jordan are the best-known names among the other authors, and they're best remembered for their work in the aviation pulps. But I think this issue would be worth reading just for Davis and Daniels.