A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Ship of Shadows - H. Bedford-Jones

THE SHIP OF SHADOWS is a Black Dog Books chapbook reprint of a vintage pulp adventure yarn by H. Bedford-Jones. This one was originally published as a complete novel in the February 1920 issue of BLUE BOOK, one of the classiest of the pulps.

Eric Venable is a minister who finds himself beset by tragedy and winds up a drug addict. That’s not a spoiler, because it’s the situation as the story opens. Venable loses his church and sinks far into the depths of degradation, only to wind up being shanghaied onto a tramp steamer bound for China. That proves to be his salvation, of course, because he’s forced to get over his opium habit and the hard work as part of the ship’s black gang builds up his body and returns his strength to him.

That’s still just prologue to the main story, which finds Venable and the ship’s engineer who has befriended him signing on as part of the crew on a mysterious ship sailing from China back to America. What Venable and his friend Garrity don’t know until it’s too late is that the ship’s passengers are all Russians, a volatile mixture of aristocrats and Bolsheviks. Each group wants to kill the other and wind up with their hands on a fortune in gems and religious artifacts which were smuggled out of Russia by a group of nobles on the run from the Reds. And there’s intrigue going on among the groups, too, as double-crosses abound.

Throw in storms at sea, a few gun battles, knife-wielding Chinamen, some far-fetched coincidences, and a little romance and you’ve got a fine example of a blood-and-thunder adventure yarn. Being decidedly old-fashioned (it was written nearly ninety years ago) [105 years ago now] and somewhat politically incorrect, it won’t be to everyone’s taste these days, of course, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 3, 2008. I love those Black Dog Books chapbooks Tom Roberts published, own most of them, and have read many of them. Great stuff all around. I don't believe this one is available directly from the publisher anymore, but affordable used copies can be found on-line. I still highly recommend it for any fans of pulp adventure yarns.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, May 1938

Herbert Morton Stoops painted all different sorts of covers for BLUE BOOK, including action-packed scenes like this one. While some are better than others, of course, he was a great cover artist and I've never seen one I didn't like. The fiction in BLUE BOOK was just as consistent as the covers. Of course, it helps when you have three stories by H. Bedford-Jones in an issue. In this case, there's one under his own name, one with his fictional collaborator Captain L.B. Williams, and one as Gordon Keyne. Also on hand are adventure pulp stalwarts Fulton Grant, Leland Jamieson, Warren Hastings Miller, William J. Makin (with a Red Wolf of Arabia story), William L. Chester (with an installment of a Kioga serial), and lesser-known writers Carl Cole and C.M. Chapin. This is the only story by Carl Cole listed in the Fictionmags Index. Who knows, maybe he was H. Bedford-Jones, too. You can't rule it out.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, December 10, 1943

This issue of SHORT STORIES is a bit of an oddity in that the cover by A.R. Tilburne doesn't feature a red sun, although there is a blob of red just above the muzzle of that nice-looking 1911. I like the cover quite a bit, even without a red sun. The line-up of authors inside this issue is really strong: H. Bedford-Jones, E. Hoffmann Price, Frank Richardson Pierce, James B. Hendryx, H.S.M. Kemp, and lesser-known Berton F. Cook and Harry Bridge. Hard to go wrong with any issue that includes HB-J, Price, Pierce, and Hendryx.

UPDATE: Yes, I suppose that could be the sun on the left, partially obscured by the foliage, but I didn't take that darker area to be a leaf. I think maybe Tilburne should have made that a little clearer. On the other hand, maybe if I was holding the actual pulp in my hands, it would be obvious. I don't mind admitting when I've missed something. I figured adding this mea culpa might be better than rewriting the whole post.
 

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Golden Goshawk - H. Bedford-Jones

H. Bedford-Jones remains one of my favorite pulp authors (favorite authors, period, in fact), and THE GOLDEN GOSHAWK is a prime example of why. This is an excellent collection from Black Dog Books. As usual, publisher Tom Roberts has put together a nice-looking volume, and he also provides an informative introduction about the origins of the four stories reprinted here.

The title story first appeared in the August 1928 issue of the rare and sought-after pulp, THE DANGER TRAIL, one of the Clayton pulps. By the time the second story, “The Jest of the Jade Joss”, appeared a year later in August 1929, the name of the magazine had been changed to WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES. Bedford-Jones wrote two more stories in this short-lived series featuring Captain Dan Marguard, but they went unpublished when WIDE WORLD ADVENTURES folded. A couple of years later, those stories were published in a different pulp, FAR EAST ADVENTURE STORIES. All four of them appeared under the pseudonym Captain L.B. Williams.

What about the stories themselves? Well, they’re great fun. Dan Marguard is a free-lance trader, adventurer, and mercenary in the South Seas, skippering an old schooner called the Gadfly. In the course of these yarns, he retrieves a stolen idol, rescues some kidnap victims, walks calmly into the stronghold of a headhunter tribe to retrieve the dried head of an old friend, and prevents a bloody native uprising. In the process, he usually finds a way to latch on to a decent payoff for himself and his two Chinese “elder brothers” who raised him. The stories are smartly plotted and told in Bedford-Jones’s usual clean, terse, exciting prose. I don’t know how authentic they are in terms of history and geography, but HB-J had the knack of making everything in his stories sound absolutely accurate and believable. He even goes to the trouble in one case of having the supposed author, Captain L.B. Williams, provide an afterword detailing the inspiration for the story, adding another layer to the fiction.

Bedford-Jones was good at this. During the Thirties, he brought back the good captain to serve as half of a joint by-line on his “Ships and Men” series that ran in BLUE BOOK. Those stories all appeared as by H. Bedford-Jones and Captain L.B. Williams. BLUE BOOK, like numerous other pulps, sometimes ran biographical features on the authors who wrote for them, and on the inside front cover of one issue was a biography and an artist’s portrait of the wholly fictional Captain L.B. Williams. The editors had to be in on the joke, but the readers at the time weren’t.

For fans of pulp adventure fiction, I can’t recommend THE GOLDEN GOSHAWK highly enough. Great yarns, a great author, and a little-known character who appeared in hard-to-find pulps adds up to a must-have as far as I’m concerned.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 4, 2010. Even though 15 years have passed, this great collection is still available on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions. And my recommendation of it remains as high as ever.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All-American Fiction, May/June 1938

That's an intriguing cover by Rudolph Belarski on this issue of ALL-AMERICAN FICTION, and what a lineup of authors! It's hard to beat H. Bedford-Jones, Max Brand, Cornell Woolrich, Philip Ketchum, Richard Sale, and Karl Detzer. Also on hard are the lesser-known Eustace Cockrell, Robert Cochran, J.R. Beehan, and Thomas Nelson. The author of the featured story "Meet Me in Miami", Joseph Mickler, has only two credits in the Fictionmags Index, both in Munsey pulps in 1938, for whatever that's worth. I would read this issue just for those other guys if I had a copy.

Review: Up the China Sea - H. Bedford-Jones

When I reviewed Edmond Hamilton’s “The World With a Thousand Moons”, I mentioned that it reminded me of some of the nautical adventure yarns written by H. Bedford-Jones. That put me in the mood to actually read one of those stories by HB-J, and the one I picked was “Up the China Sea”, a novella originally published in the July 10, 1923 issue of the iconic pulp ADVENTURE and available as a stand-alone e-book on Amazon, the edition I read. (Ignore the old-fashioned pirate on the e-book cover; this is a modern-day yarn.)

The protagonist of this story is a stalwart sailor named Bracken, who’s the first officer of a steamer called the Fengshui. (I have to admit, the ship’s name is a bit of a distraction at first, but I soon forgot about it.) The steamer leaves Singapore and heads up the coast to salvage the cargo off a ship that wrecked. Bracken doesn’t fully trust the captain and suspects there’s more going on than he knows about, and of course, he’s right. The wreck holds secrets that involve the attractive widow of its late captain, and Bracken and his crewmates aren’t the only ones after them.

Bedford-Jones doesn’t keep the plot twists secret for very long since the bulk of the story is devoted to scenes of chasing and fighting and cold-blooded murder, of capture and escape and daring rescues. All the stuff of classic pulp adventure yarns, in other words. Bedford-Jones keeps things racing along to an exciting, bullet-flying climax.

I always enjoy stories like this, and “Up the China Sea” is no exception. I really like the way Bedford-Jones writes, and that clean, propulsive style makes a story like this—which is just a tad bit by the numbers, to be honest—very entertaining to read. If you’re a fan of his work, it’s very much worth reading. If you’ve never sampled one of his yarns before, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start since it’s an example of the type of story that Bedford-Jones did better than just about anybody else.

D'Artagnan - H. Bedford-Jones

I’ve been a fan of the Three Musketeers for a long time, ever since I bought the Whitman edition of the novel when I was a kid and read it. I read the Classics Illustrated comic book version, too, and over the years I’ve watched and enjoyed most of the movie versions. I really liked the BBC TV series from a few years back and that’s how I see the characters in my head now.

So when I was in the mood to read a swashbuckler recently, I picked up D'ARTAGNAN, a pastiche sequel to the original, written by one of my favorite authors, H. Bedford-Jones. It was published originally as a three-part serial in the pulp ADVENTURE in September and October of 1928 and reprinted several years ago by Altus Press.

Set approximately a year after the events in THE THREE MUSKETEERS, this novel is supposedly, according to Bedford-Jones, expanded from an unpublished manuscript by Alexandre Dumas. ADVENTURE plays that up on the cover of the issue containing the first installment of the serial. However, according to the Fictionmags Index, the only material by Dumas is a one-page excerpt from an article that has nothing to do with the book itself. No matter. D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are back, protecting Queen Anne of France from the schemes of the evil Cardinal Richelieu, although D’Artagnan does most of the heavy lifting in this book, befitting the title. Aramis is wounded and barely shows up. Athos and Porthos are busy with other things for most of the first half, although they play major roles in the second half of the book.

The plot, which involves various rings used for identification, missing documents and letters, wild coincidence after wild coincidence, ambushes, swordfights, disguises, and a mysterious child, is almost impossible to summarize. All the political intrigue is so complicated that I’m still not sure I understood everything that was going on. But again, no matter. D’Artagnan and his friends gallop hither and yon and save the day. That’s all that’s really important.

Bedford-Jones’ prose is a little more flowery than usual, which I suppose is understandable since he was writing a Dumas pastiche, and the plot, as I mentioned, is downright murky. But the action scenes, and there are a lot of them, are great. The final climactic battle, in which D’Artagnan, Athos, and Porthos face overwhelming odds in a French tavern, is just terrific, the sort of thing that would have had me bouncing up and down in my chair in suspense and excitement if I’d read this when I was a kid.

The good stuff far outweighs the weaker bits in D’ARTAGNAN. I had a great time reading it. If you’re a Three Musketeers fan like me or just enjoy a good swashbuckler, you should definitely give it a try. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions on Amazon.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Far East Adventure Stories, September 1931

That's a very effective, evocative cover by Don Hewitt on this issue of FAR EAST ADVENTURE STORIES. I certainly would have picked that one up off the newsstand back in 1931, and the authors inside probably would have prompted me to slap down a couple of dimes if I had them: H. Bedford-Jones (with part of a John Solomon story), two stories by Hugh B. Cave (one under his pseudonym Geoffrey Vace), a yarn by Bob du Soe, and stories by forgotten pulpsters Chester L. Saxby, Sgt. Herbert E. Smith, A.L. De Burgh, and T.S. Southwick. De Burgh has only two credits in the FMI, Southwick only one, and that always makes me suspect the names are pseudonyms for better known authors, but who knows? All I know is that this looks like a very enjoyable pulp, and it's the final one of the year in this series. But I'll be back next week in a new year, if all goes according to plan. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, September 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by George Rozen, who has become one of my favorite Western pulp cover artists even though he’s probably best remembered for his covers on various issues of THE SHADOW.

I don’t know anything about Alexander Wallace except that he produced about three dozen stories for various pulps, mostly from Fiction House, between 1946 and 1954. His novelette “The White Peril” in this issue has an Indian as its protagonist, a young Crow chief called Blue Star, who has to battle a white gunrunner with plans to arm the Sioux, who are bitter enemies to the Crow. I don’t recall reading anything else by Wallace, but maybe I should because the writing in this one is very good. The story moves along well and I enjoyed it.

“Water Power” is a more humorous story than the others I’ve read by Ed La Vanway. It’s about a water witcher using a divining rod to head off a war between a cattle baron and some sodbusters. It’s pretty lightweight but okay reading.

Joseph Chadwick has become one of my favorite hardboiled Western authors. His novelette “Home to Boot Hill” features a first-person narrator, sort of unusual for Westerns of this era, a former Texas Ranger who fears he’s gone gun-shy. But he returns home to New Mexico anyway to help his old flame (who is now married) fight off attempts by the local cattle baron (yeah, another of those pesky cattle barons) to force her off her ranch. Nice gritty action and an offbeat protagonist make this one work all the way around. I liked it a lot.

Next up is the novelette “The Saddle Pards at Buzzard Butte”, an entry in a series I usually skip, Swap and Whopper by Syl MacDowell. These are slapstick comedy Westerns starring a couple of hapless saddle tramps, Swap Bootle and Whopper Whaley. (Think sort of Abbott and Costello in the contemporary West, but not quite.) I decided I was going to read this one and stick with it to the end, no matter what. And I did. It’s a bizarre concoction featuring a guitar, road construction, and a baseball game. To my surprise, I actually smiled a couple of times. MacDowell was a good writer. His more traditional Westerns are usually pretty entertaining. Although it’s not saying much, this is my favorite Swap and Whopper story so far. Will that make me go back and dig out all the ones I’ve skipped in the past? Not likely. But if I come across another one, I’ll at least give it a try.

C. William Harrison is a consistently good writer, so it’s no surprise that his short story “Granger—Draw or Die!” is an enjoyable yarn. It’s about a cowboy who gives up that life to become a farmer and his inevitable clash with the cattleman who’s his former employer. Well done, with some good characters and action.

I’m pretty sure I read H. Bedford-Jones’s novelette “Dead Man’s Boots” in the November 1936 issue of THRILLING WESTERN in which it first appeared. It’s reprinted in this issue, and since it’s been more than 20 years since I read it the first time, I tackled it again. It’s a fine story (I’m not sure Bedford-Jones was capable of writing anything else) about a gun-swift drifter riding away from trouble in the border country and right into more trouble involving a double-cross partnership between a crooked saloon owner and a cattle baron. (Lots of cattle barons in this issue.) While the plot is suitably twisty and there’s plenty of action, I’ve always felt that while Bedford-Jones’s traditional Westerns are good, they’re not quite as strong as his historical and straight adventure yarns. “Dead Man’s Boots” is a prime example of that. There’s nothing wrong with it except that it reads like the sort of story that dozens of other Western pulpsters could have written just as well. Maybe that’s holding HB-J to a higher standard than I should, I don’t know, but that’s the way this story struck me.

I always enjoy Ray Gaulden’s work, too. His short story in this issue, “Boom Town Trouble-Shooter” is a mining story involving a boom town (no surprise there, considering the title) and yet another crooked saloon owner. Gaulden packs quite a bit of plot and action into a story of less than 10 pages and does a good job of it.

Ernest Haycox’s short story “Skirmish at Dry Fork” is a reprint from the July 25, 1942 issue of the slick magazine COLLIER’S. But it’s right at home in THRILLING WESTERN, as well. It’s about a group of cavalry troopers who visit a town for a celebration on payday and their inevitable clash with a bunch of cowboys leading to a saloon brawl. Then a young soldier falls for one of the soiled doves who works in the saloon, leading to more trouble. Since this is an Ernest Haycox story, you know it’s well-written, and while Haycox’s work sometimes leaves me a little cold, I really liked this one. Some nice action and very good characters and a few poignant touches make it work really well.

“Six-Gun Specter” is a short story bylined Johanas L. Bouma, rather than the more common J.L. Bouma. It’s a tale about a young man with two outlaw brothers who’s trying to escape his family’s shady past. A stagecoach robbery and a beautiful young woman prove to be turning points for him. This is a pretty good story marred by a very rushed ending.

Robert Ferguson is the author of “Medicine”, a short story about an Apache attack on an isolated ranch in Arizona. Ferguson published only a handful of stories. This is the only one I’ve read, and I didn’t like it at all. Didn’t care for the writing, didn’t like the characters, and almost didn’t finish it. That happens sometimes. Might’ve just been me.

Overall, I’d say this is an above-average issue of THRILLING WESTERN, based on the good cover by George Rozen, the stories by Ernest Haycox, Joseph Chadwick, and Alexander Wallace, and the offbeat elements in some of the other stories. And I even kind of enjoyed the Swap and Whopper yarn! Maybe I will check out some of the others in the series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, August 1941

I don't think this cover is as good as many others by Herbert Morton Stoops, but this is an important issue of BLUE BOOK anyway. It's the last one that was a true pulp. Trimmed, maybe, but still a pulp. The next issue it went to the larger quarto size. As usual with BLUE BOOK, H. Bedford-Jones is well-represented in the Table of Contents with three stories, one under his own name and one each as by Gordon Keyne and Michael Gallister. Also contributing to this issue are Richard Wormser, Georges Surdez, Lemuel de Bra, Robert R. Mill, Raymond S. Spears, Jacland Marmur, and little-known writers John Upton Terrell, George Agnew Chamberlain, Charles Wellington Furlong, and George Weston. With Bedford-Jones anchoring their stable, BLUE BOOK always had good authors in its pages.

Ghost Hills - H. Bedford-Jones

GHOST HILLS, originally serialized in four issues of THE CAVALIER in July and August 1913, is one of H. Bedford-Jones’s earliest novels. The fact that it’s featured on the cover of the issue containing the first installment is an indication that even this early in his career, Bedford-Jones was a popular author and was considered a draw for the readers.

This yarn is a Northern, set in the Canadian wilderness close to the Arctic Circle where the landscape is covered with snow and ice year ‘round and during the summer, when this novel is set, the skies are ablaze with the Northern Lights around the clock. Most of the action takes place in a desolate wilderness known as the Empty Places, which is haunted by the Silent Ones, and to get there, you have to travel through the forbidding Ghost Hills of the title.

This setting gives Bedford-Jones plenty of opportunities for vivid, eerie descriptive passages. His protagonist, footloose American Barr Radison, has come to Canada and thrown in with Tom “Take-a-Chance” Macklin, an agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company who ventured into the far north to find out the source of some rare black and silver fox pelts. They run into a jovial (but still sinister), seemingly half-mad giant Scotsman, Macferris Montenay, who’s in love with the beautiful daughter of a man who runs an isolated trading post. Of course, Radison falls for her, too, which gives Montenay one more reason to hate him. Montenay already thinks Radison is a threat to his plans because he believes the American to be descended from old Pierre Radisson, a famous explorer who vanished somewhere in the Empty Places two hundred years earlier. (This story is set in the early Twentieth Century, roughly the same time as Bedford-Jones wrote it.) According to an old prophecy, one of Radisson’s descendants will show up and claim the empire that Montenay is trying to build.

That’s a lot going on, and Bedford-Jones mixes in a feud between two Indian tribes as well. Naturally, each tribe takes sides in the rivalry between Radison and Montenay. And then there’s an evil half-breed with his own agenda.

Despite all that plot, GHOST HILLS has some pacing problems, as too many pages in the first three-quarters of the book are spent tramping around the snowy wilderness. It’s very well-written in places but doesn’t really get us anywhere. The final quarter of the book is mostly terrific, though, as all the strands of the story come together in a series of suspenseful action scenes culminating in an explosive battle. I say mostly terrific because the ending is something of a letdown again with too much of the action taking place off-screen.

This early in his career, Bedford-Jones’s prose is more old-fashioned and not as smooth as it would be at the peak of his career in the Thirties and Forties. Even so, GHOST HILLS is an entertaining yarn with some good characters and some really creepy, well-done scenes. I guessed the secret of the Silent Ones pretty early on, but that revelation late in the book is still very effective. If you’ve never read Bedford-Jones, this probably wouldn’t be a good one to start with, but if you’re already a fan like I am, I think it’s well worth reading. You can find various e-book editions of it on-line, as a stand-alone book and as part of Bedford-Jones collections, and it’s also available as a handsome trade paperback from Altus Press, part of the H. Bedford-Jones Library.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, May 1939

As far as I'm concerned, BLUE BOOK was at its peak in the mid-to-late Thirties, although it remained at a pretty high level on into the Forties. But that's the era when it had great authors and a long run of consistently excellent covers by Herbert Morton Stoops. Here's one of them, illustrating a story from H. Bedford-Jones' series "Trumpets From Oblivion". Bedford-Jones had two other stories in this issue, an installment of "Ships and Men" (a "collaboration" between him and the fictional Captain L.B. Williams) and one under his Gordon Keyne pseudonym. Other authors in this issue are Will Jenkins (better known under his pseudonym Murray Leinster), Georges Surdez, Karl Detzer, and Fulton T. Grant. That's a great bunch of pulpsters.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure Trails, February 1939

The third and final issue of this short-lived adventure pulp features a nice machine gun cover (I don't know the artist) and stories by authors who are almost completely forgotten these days. The exceptions are Rodney Blake (because he was actually H. Bedford-Jones) and Robert Moore Williams. The other stories are by James Dorn, Lon Taylor, R.A. Emberg, Paul Carney, Everett Holloway, and house-name Brent North. Several of these authors are well enough known to be mentioned on the cover, but the names don't mean anything to me. Which, as I've often mentioned, doesn't mean the stories aren't good. But a lineup like that may have something to do with why the magazine lasted only three issues.

UPDATE: That cover is by J.W. Scott. Artist ID by Sheila Ann Vanderbeek. Many thanks!

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Magic Carpet Magazine, July 1933

This pulp also contains a Robert E. Howard story, his historical novelette "The Lion of Tiberias". But also behind that J. Allen St. John cover, you'll find a superb novella by H. Bedford-Jones, "Pearls From Macao" (which Tom Roberts reprinted as an early entry in his Black Dog Books line, many years ago, the edition I read and remember fondly), as well as stories by E. Hoffmann Price, Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, Warren Hastings Miller, and Geoffrey Vace, who was actually Hugh B. Cave's brother Geoffrey. This is just a spectacular issue of THE MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE, a great example of why the pulps were so wonderful, and if you want to read it for yourself, Adventure House has reprinted the whole thing. High recommended.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, October 25, 1934

This cover by William Reusswig provides further proof, as if we needed it, that pith helmets just attract trouble. You don't even have to be wearing one. Just having it on your raft is enough. Just as knowing that this is an issue of SHORT STORIES is enough to tell you there are some great authors inside. In this case, H. Bedford-Jones ("Tiger Blood" is a great title!), Jackson Gregory, Bennett Foster, Bob du Soe, and Bertrand W. Sinclair, along with a few lesser-known writers. Any time you see a blood-red sun on the cover of a pulp, you know you're in for excitement.

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.

Down the Coast of Barbary - H. Bedford-Jones

In 1730, Patrick Spence is an American sea captain whose ship is sunk by pirates off the Barbary Coast. Spence is the only survivor. He’s picked up by a passing British vessel and taken to Algeria, where he finds himself broke and stranded, with no prospects of getting back to America.

He makes a friend, however, a British clergyman who is in Algeria to study ancient ruins. For an elderly preacher, he proves to be surprisingly handy with a sword, too, if that’s not too much of a spoiler, and I don’t think it is since this is an H. Bedford-Jones historical swashbuckler and you know there’s going to be a lot of swordplay.

At any rate, Spence and his friend Dr. Shaw soon find themselves up to their necks in intrigue and danger as they get involved with a Moroccan nobleman who’s trying to seize the throne of that country and a renegade Dutchman who is also after the throne so that he can consolidate all the countries along the Barbary Coast and promote a war with Spain. Everybody’s trying to get their hands on a mysterious box that holds the key to the fate of empires. Oh, and there’s a beautiful young Englishwoman in the mix, too.

DOWN THE COAST OF BARBARY is a short novel by H. Bedford-Jones first published in the October 21, 1922 issue of ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY, more than 99 years ago, but as always with Bedford-Jones, the prose is only slightly old-fashioned and he keeps the action moving along at a very nice pace. The plotting is a little too muddled here and there, making it difficult to keep up with everybody’s motivations, and a bit too much happens off-screen, but the action scenes (and there are plenty of them) are spectacular and Spence is a very likable protagonist. This novel isn’t in the top rank of Bedford-Jones’ work, but it’s a solid second-tier yarn and is well worth reading. I was entertained from start to finish.

DOWN THE COAST OF BARBARY was reprinted in PULP ADVENTURES #24, published by Bold Venture Press, and, being in the public domain, is also available on-line here and there.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, January 10, 1943

A pith helmet, a swastika, a mysterious ring, a guy who looks a little like Robert Mitchum, and a red sun in the background . . . Yep, this is a cover for SHORT STORIES, one of the great adventure pulps. The artist is E. Franklin Wittmack. Authors on hand in this issue are H. Bedford-Jones, William MacLeod Raine, Allan Vaughan Elston, William R. Cox, Philip Ketchum, Fulton T. Grant, and H.S.M. Kemp. Since the dates on pulp magazines were off-sale dates, when newsstand employees would pull them to return, that means this issue was still on the stands 79 years ago today. You'd have to grab it before the next day if you wanted a copy.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, August 17, 1935

Yes, the serials are annoying and the bane of a collector's existence, but I love ARGOSY anyway. There was just so much fine fiction and so many great authors to be found in its pages. This issue has a cover by Paul Stahr, who did most of them for the magazine during the Thirties. The lead story is a circus yarn by John Wilstach. I haven't read this one, but I've read other circus stories by Wilstach and enjoyed them all. Also on hand are Frederick Faust (twice, as Max Brand and Dennis Lawton), H. Bedford-Jones, Borden Chase, Anthony M. Rud, and Hapsburg Liebe. And that's just a typical issue of ARGOSY in the Thirties, the magazine's glory days as far as I'm concerned. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, October 10, 1932

That's a nice, evocative "red sun" cover by Edgar Franklin Wittmack on this issue of SHORT STORIES. And you certainly can't argue with the great bunch of writers inside: H. Bedford-Jones, W.C. Tuttle, William Chamberlain, James B. Hendryx, Lemuel de Bra, and Cliff Farrell, among others. Jacland Marmur is listed on the cover but according to the Fictionmags Index doesn't actually have a story in this issue. Still plenty of good adventure reading there.