Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Feds, October 1936

THE FEDS was a G-Man pulp published by Street & Smith, a company that usually was very successful with anything they put out there. Not so with THE FEDS, which lasted for only 15 issues in 1936 and '37. But its lack of longevity can't be attributed to the generally pretty good covers, including this one on the second issue which is probably collectable because of the presence of all those Ku Klux Klansmen on it. I don't know who painted it. Nor were the writers any slouches. This issue features stories by Steve Fisher, Wyatt Blassingame, W.T. Ballard, Arthur J. Burks, William G. Bogart, Laurence Donovan, Jean Francis Webb, George Allan Moffatt (Edwin V. Burkholder), James Duncan (Arthur Pincus), and house-name Bruce Harley. Probably some good reading there. I don't own this issue and it doesn't appear to be available on-line, but if I did have a copy of it, I wouldn't hesitate to give it a try. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: G-Men, November 1935

As some of you know, I’m a long-time fan of the Dan Fowler series. Fowler, ace agent of the F.B.I., had his adventures chronicled in the pages of the pulp G-MEN (later G-MEN DETECTIVE) for many years, first under the house-name C.K.M. Scanlon and then later under the real names of the various authors who contributed novels to the series. The November 1935 issue of G-MEN, sporting a cover possibly by Richard Lyon, contains the second Dan Fowler novel, which has a great title: “Bring ’Em Back Dead”.

I don’t own this issue, but I do have a copy of BRING ’EM BACK DEAD, a great collection from Black Dog Books that reprints the first three Dan Fowler novels. I read and reviewed the first one, “Snatch!”, a while back, and now I’ve moved on to the second novel in the series. In this one, Fowler and his friend and fellow agent Larry Kendal are after a gang responsible for multiple thefts of silk shipments once they’ve arrived from the Orient and are on their way to wholesalers in the United States. There’s a great sequence on board a train that takes up the first part of the story, with shootouts, chases, and the grisly murder of a young agent. The crooks get away, but with Dan Fowler on their trail, you know they’ll run out of luck sooner or later.

The Fowler novels are a very appealing blend of well-done procedural drama and terrific action scenes. That’s the case in this one as Fowler and Kendal prove to be dogged investigators, as usual, but can also throw a punch or handle a tommy gun with great skill. Beautiful blond Sally Vane, the love of Dan’s life, joins the Bureau after helping out as an amateur in the previous novel and comes in for her own share of the action.

Like “Snatch!”, “Bring ’Em Back Dead” was written by the creator of the series, George Fielding Eliot, under the C.K.M. Scanlon name. Most of the Fowler novels I’ve read have been from later in the series, but I really like these early ones. I give a high recommendation to the Black Dog Books reprint volume, which is available in both e-book and paperback editions.

Since I don’t own the actual pulp issue, I haven’t read the two backup stories, but they’re by Tom Curry, whose Westerns I enjoy, and Joe Archibald, whose work is kind of hit-and-miss for me, but many of his stories are good. I suspect I’ll be reading another Dan Fowler story relatively soon. It’s a great series. And it occurred to me while I was reading this one that it’s a shame Republic Pictures never made a Dan Fowler serial directed by William Witney and John English and starring Clayton Moore as Dan. Well, I can imagine it, can’t I?

Spicy Zeppelin Stories - Will Murray

SPICY ZEPPELIN STORIES is a pulp reprint of a pulp that never existed. As author Will Murray explains in his introduction, the concept began as a joke in the early days of Odyssey Publications, one of the first of the pulp reprinters back in the Eighties. Under a variety of pseudonyms, some of them anagrams of his real name, Murray set out to write stories in various pulp genres, basing his style in them on actual pulp authors, but adding in the spicy elements common to the genre (most often, beautiful young women losing some or all of their clothes by accident). The stories remained in his files for years but were finally gathered together and published by Tattered Pages Press. Now, in a real full circle move, Odyssey Publications has just brought out a new edition, using the never-before-seen original cover by Mike Symes and art from the Tattered Pages Press edition by Bobb Cotter.

That background is fun for pulp fans, but here’s where it gets really interesting: this book may have had its origins in a joke, but that doesn’t mean Murray failed to take writing the stories seriously. It may have been early in his career when he produced these yarns, but his storytelling ability was already there, along with a keen grasp of pulp history and what makes such stories work.

The collection leads off with “Gondola Girl”, a novella featuring tycoon King “Steel” Chane, whose efforts to establish an airship line are being sabotaged. The battle between Chane and his rival leads to a South Seas island where an important secret is waiting to be discovered. Murray’s inspiration in this story is Lester Dent, and as he continued to do for decades afterward, he does a great job of capturing the breakneck pace of Dent’s work.

“Gasbag Buckaroo” (great title) finds a stalwart young cowboy trying to solve the mystery of who’s rustling cattle from the ranch belong to the young woman he loves. “Hydrogen Horror” is a World War I spy yarn with a lot of flying action. In “Zeps of the Void”, two-fisted adventurer Solar Smith fights space pirates. G-Man Jeff Holt tries to discover who murdered all the passengers on a train speeding through the Kentucky hills in “Rail Lair”. No pulp collection would be complete without a Weird Menace story, and “Catwalk Creeper” fills the bill in this volume with a tale of passengers on a trans-Atlantic zeppelin flight turned to stone by a mysterious killer. The book wraps up with “Chane”, another appearance by King “Steel” Chane, the hero of “Gondola Girl”. This enigmatic tale brings up more questions than it answers.

While Murray’s writing may not be as polished in these stories than it is later on, the sense of fun and enthusiasm in them is highly infectious. I had a great time reading them. His command of the various genres is top-notch and all the stories race along, taking the reader with them on a thrilling ride. I really enjoyed SPICY ZEPPELIN STORIES. It’s available in paperback and hardcover editions, and I give it a high recommendation for all pulp fans.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: G-Men, October 1935

I’ve read quite a few Dan Fowler novels by various authors over the years, but “Snatch!” goes back to the series’ origin, appearing in the very first issue of the pulp G-MEN, cover-dated October 1935. Dan Fowler is an agent of the Division of Investigation, a name still used by author George Fielding Eliot even though the DOI’s name was changed officially to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in July of that same year. It’s likely Eliot wrote the story before that name change went into effect.

But that’s just a minor point of interest and doesn’t really matter. Although he’s never referred to by name, the chief of the DOI is clearly J. Edgar Hoover, and he assigns Fowler and his sidekick, Agent Larry Kendal, to break up the notorious Gray Gang and bring its leader Ray Norshire, the top name on the Most Wanted list, to justice. Norshire and his gang have been robbing banks all over the Midwest, and they’ve just gone into the kidnapping racket as well, having abducted the infant daughter of a bank president. Fowler gets the assignment because he’s from one of those Midwest states (Eliot doesn’t specify which one) and his father is still a county sheriff there.

Fowler and Kendal take off for the Midwest, and when they reach Fowler’s hometown, he meets up with an old flame, telephone operator Sally Vane, whose father is also a lawman, a detective on the local police force. But Fowler soon becomes suspicious that the elder Vane may be mixed up with the Gray Gang, an unexpected and unwanted complication.

Despite the title, the kidnapping angle of this novel is wrapped up in the first half of the yarn, and the rest of it is devoted to running down Ray Norshire and his minions and uncovering the real mastermind behind the gang. (The mastermind’s identity won’t come as much of a surprise to regular pulp readers.) It’s a fast-moving blend of investigative procedure and wild shootouts, chases, captures, and escapes. Given everything that’s gone before, the ending maybe isn’t as dramatic as it could have been, but it’s still satisfying.

It's been quite a while since I read anything by George Fielding Eliot, a prolific contributor to the detective, adventure, and war pulps, but for some reason, I had it in mind that his writing was a little stodgy. Not so in this story, anyway. At times it reminded me a little of Norvell Page’s crazed, over-the-top Spider novels. Which is a good thing, mind you. Now I’m eager to read more by Eliot. After the pulp era, he went on to a career writing military and historical non-fiction, so maybe that’s where I got the idea. I’m glad to be proven wrong.

It's also interesting to see the first appearance of Sally Vane, who is Fowler’s long-running romantic interest in the series and an FBI agent. I didn’t know she started out working as something else.

I read an e-book reprint of the lead novel and don’t own the original pulp, but the three backup stories are by Howard R. Marsh, Westmoreland Grey, and none other than an old favorite of mine, Leslie Scott writing under his A. Leslie pseudonym. Scott is best remembered as a Western writer, of course, but he wrote in other genres as well.

With “Snatch!”, the Dan Fowler series gets off to a great start. I’ll be reading more of them in the near future. (As I may have mentioned, I’ll be writing a Dan Fowler story for an anthology later this year, so I’m trying to get in as much of the proper mindset as possible.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: G-Men Detective, April 1946

“Escape From Alcatraz”, from the April 1946 issue of G-MEN DETECTIVE, is another of the Dan Fowler stories that’s available on-line. It was published a couple of issues after “Diamonds Across the Atlantic”, also written by Edward Churchill, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago.

I thought that other Churchill story was okay, but “Escape From Alcatraz” is considerably better. It opens with the escape of the title, as gangster Killer Joe Boyd makes a successful getaway from the Rock and then disappears. The FBI, represented by our heroes Inspector Dan Fowler and Special Agent Larry Kendal, tracks him to a small town in Washington state not far from the Canadian border. Fowler and Kendal take off for the Pacific Northwest while Special Agent Sally Vane tries to track down the escaped killer’s girlfriend.

Then Churchill springs a nice twist in the plot pretty early on, and the case takes on a broader sweep that involves police corruption, smuggling, and a missing fortune in cash and negotiable bonds.

“Escape From Alcatraz” reads like a fairly realistic law enforcement procedural at times, although there are plenty of shootouts and fistfights and chase scenes along the way, too. Churchill certainly doesn’t forget that his story is being published in a pulp. His style is a little flat at times, but he keeps things moving along at an entertaining clip. Also, it’s hard not to like the trio of Fowler, Kendal, and Vane. They’re not exactly Perry Mason, Paul Drake, and Della Street, but a little of that same camaraderie comes through at times.

I read the e-book version of the Fowler story and don’t own the pulp, but as you can see, the cover is a good one and actually represents the lead novel pretty well. There are some good authors with stories in there, too, including Roger Torrey, Norman A. Daniels, and Robert Sidney Bowen. If you happen to have a copy of this one, it ought to be worth pulling down from the shelf and reading. Or you can find the whole thing on the Internet Archive here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: G-Men Detective, Winter 1946

I don’t own a copy of this pulp, but the Dan Fowler lead novel, “Diamonds Across the Atlantic” by Edward Churchill, used to be available as an inexpensive e-book. It appears to be gone from Amazon now, but it's still on my Kindle, so I read it recently. I’m going to be writing a Dan Fowler story myself in a few months, so I have to get in the proper frame of mind. Not to mention, I always enjoy the Fowler yarns that appeared in G-MEN and G-MEN DETECTIVE.

This story finds Inspector Dan Fowler of the F.B.I. on the trail of a gang that robbed a train traveling between New York and Detroit. Assisted as usual by fellow agents Larry Kendal and Sally Vane (Fowler’s girlfriend, but they can’t really get serious because they have jobs to do; you know how that goes), he soon discovers that the robbery is connected to a bunch of Nazi saboteurs smuggled into the country on a fishing boat that docked in Boston. The object of the robbery is a secret at first, but I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler (it’s right there in the title) to reveal that what everybody’s after is a bunch of industrial diamonds that the failing German war machine desperately needs. (By the time this issue was published, the war had been over for almost a year, but clearly, this Fowler novel was written much earlier.)

The trail of the Nazis and the diamonds leads from Detroit back to New York and then on to Miami and ultimately Brazil. Our heroes get shot at, knocked out, and thrown off speeding trains. There’s plenty of action, as well as some actual detective work by Fowler. The Fowler novels were never actually police procedurals, but they came close at times. Everything wraps up in a satisfying, high-flying climax.

Edward Churchill wrote ten Dan Fowler novels, some under his own name and some under the house-name C.K.M. Scanlon. He also wrote several dozen other stories for various detective, sports, and aviation pulps. He’s not much remembered these days, probably because his writing style was a little flat and bland at times. But on the other hand, he could put together an exciting, interesting plot, as he does in “Diamonds Across the Atlantic”. I wouldn’t put this one in the top rank of Dan Fowler stories, but I enjoyed it quite a bit and it probably won’t be long before I read the other Churchill entry I have, “Escape From Alcatraz”.

The rest of this issue, according to the Fictionmags Index, features stories by Norman A. Daniels (writing as Wayland Rice), Johnston McCulley, David X. Manners, and Curtiss T. Gardner. Daniels and McCulley are always worth reading. I haven’t sampled any work from the other two. But it looks like a good issue overall, with a nice cover.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: G-Men, April 1938

I like this cover because it has a good-looking redhead and a Tommy-gun on it. Which may make me a bit shallow, but as usual, I don't care. I've enjoyed every Dan Fowler novel I've read, although some are certainly better than others. "The Devil's Playground", the novel in this issue, has the C.K.M. Scanlon house-name on it, and there's no attribution for it in the Fictionmags Index, so I suppose we don't know who really wrote this one. Edward Churchill, who has a short story in this issue under his own name, was writing some of the Fowlers during this time period, so he might be the author behind the house-name. Or not. Either way, I'm sure I'd like it.