Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Planet Stories, March 1943

I like this PLANET STORIES cover by Jerome Rozen, and inside this issue are stories by some excellent writers: Leigh Brackett, Nelson S. Bond, Carl Jacobi, Ross Rocklynne, Ray Cummings, and Milton Lesser (better known these days as Stephen Marlowe). This and a bunch of other PLANET STORIES issues can be read on-line here. Would that I had time to do so!

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Ranch Romances, Second July Number, 1955

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know the artist. I’ve said before that RANCH ROMANCES was a good Western pulp during the Fifties, and this issue is no exception. It leads off with “Stampede Valley”, a novella by J.L. Bouma, a prolific author of Western pulp stories and novels. Bouma used very traditional plots but handled them well. This one has a powerful rancher trying to crowd out the smaller outfits in the valley. The protagonist is a young cowboy who works for the cattle baron but comes to realize he’s on the wrong side. This is a well-written, enjoyable tale that seems a little rushed at the end, its only real drawback.

Bill Burchardt’s stories and novels are often set in Indian Territory. “The Deputy’s Daughter” finds one of Judge Parker’s deputy marshals using his own daughter as bait to catch an owlhoot. It’s not a terrible story, but the writing never really caught my interest and there’s not much of a payoff. I’ve enjoyed other Burchardt stories more in the past.

The novelette “Renegade’s Girl” finds two lawmen transporting a convicted killer by train over a snowy Montana landscape to the town here he’ll be hanged. The outlaw’s victim was the twin brother of one of the lawmen. This is an excellent set-up, and since the author is Walker A. Tompkins, one of my favorites, it’s no surprise that this is a taut, suspenseful yarn. Tompkins is always good, and he’s at the top of his game in this one.

There are three more short stories in this issue. “Sinner Man” by Talmage Powell is about a traveling preacher, his beautiful daughter, and a vengeance-seeking gunfighter. “Woman for a Hoeman” is a terrible title for a cattlemen-vs.-sodbusters story by Ed La Vanway. “To Brand a Maverick” is a rare Western by Milton Lesser/Stephen Marlowe under his Adam Chase pseudonym that’s about the son of an outlaw deciding whether to go straight or follow in his father’s footsteps. All are well-written, and all have rather limp endings that really dilute their effectiveness. But they’re all readable.

There are also some assorted features and short fact articles I didn’t read, as usual, as well as the third of four serial installments of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS, a novel by Joseph Chadwick under his pseudonym Jack Barton. I didn’t read the serial, either, but I have the Popular Library edition of the novel and I might get around to reading it one of these days. Chadwick is usually good. And this is a good issue of RANCH ROMANCES based on the stories by Tompkins and Bouma, even though the rest of the fiction is pretty forgettable. It also has some nice interior art by Everett Raymond Kinstler.

UPDATE: Here's the paperback edition of THE VENGEANCE RIDERS.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Fantastic Story Quarterly, Winter 1951

Hey, watch those hands, you guys! I thought at first this cover was by Earle Bergey, but it's not attributed to him anywhere that I can find. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but it's certainly suggestive and eye-catching no matter who painted it. This issue of FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY is mostly reprint, with only two new stories by Frank Belknap Long and Milton Lesser, best remembered as Stephen Marlowe. The reprints, from various issues of WONDER STORIES and WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY in the Thirties, are by Eric Frank Russell, Clark Ashton Smith, Eando Binder (Earl and Otto Binder), and a couple of authors I'm not familiar with, Alan Connell and Siegfried Wagener (his only credit in the FMI).

Forgotten Books: The Second Longest Night - Stephen Marlowe

’Way back when I was in high school, I read one of the later books in the Chester Drum series by Stephen Marlowe, and I also read DOUBLE IN TROUBLE, the famous crossover novel that features both Chester Drum and Shell Scott, co-authored by Marlowe and Richard S. Prather. I thought both of them were okay, but I never felt compelled to read any more of the Chester Drum novels.

It’s a well-regarded series, though, so I finally decided after all this time to try another one. I started with the first novel in the series, THE SECOND LONGEST NIGHT, published by Gold Medal in 1955.

Chester Drum is a private eye, or confidential investigator, as he calls himself, in Washington D.C. In this novel, he’s hired by a senator (who happens to be his former father-in-law) to find out if the senator’s daughter (Drum’s ex-wife) actually committed suicide, as the official verdict has it, or if something more sinister happened. This leads him into a case involving murder, family drama, and international intrigue, and takes him to Venezuala for part of the book. (From what I understand, most of the novels take Drum to foreign countries.)

THE SECOND LONGEST NIGHT is very well-written, with vivid settings and some gritty action scenes. The characters are interesting, although Drum is a rather dour protagonist. He makes with a wisecrack every now and then, but mostly he’s as wooden as a stick. The fatal flaw in this novel is that the plot is so easy to figure out. The murderer might as well be wearing a blinking neon sign.

Because of that, I can give this book only a qualified recommendation. I liked enough about it that I’ll probably read another one in the series (I own most of them), but I won’t be in any hurry to do so.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Fantastic Adventures, December 1952

Okay, maybe I'm crazy, or just a 12-year-old boy at heart, or both, but that cover by Robert Gibson Jones is just great! Riding in a sling under the neck of a giant bat while fighting spaceships with a smoking raygun! I mean, what could possibly be cooler? I don't know which story in this issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES it goes with, if any of them. Milton Lesser, who went on to become Stephen Marlowe, of course, is the only author in it I've heard of. The others are a mixture of house-names and writers I'm not familiar with. I'll bet I'd have a good time reading it anyway. Or I could just look at the cover and imagine my own story to go with it.

Forgotten Books: Quest of the Golden Ape - Ivar Jorgensen and Adam Chase

There's some question as to who actually wrote this novel, which was originally published as a serial in the January, February, and March 1957 issues of the science fiction digest magazine AMAZING. Most sources credit it to Randall Garrett (writing as "Ivar Jorgensen") and Milton Lesser (writing as "Adam Chase"). It's well established that Lesser, better known for his hardboiled mysteries under the name Stephen Marlowe, was Adam Chase. Robert Silverberg, who knew everyone involved, says that Jorgensen, in this case, was really Paul W. Fairman, the editor of AMAZING. Jorgensen started out as one of Fairman's pseudonyms before it became a house name.

Regardless of who wrote it—and I lean toward Fairman and Lesser, myself, with Fairman writing the first installment and Lesser the second and third—QUEST OF THE GOLDEN APE is a fine example of the sort of science fiction "they don't write anymore", to the dismay of old codgers such as myself who grew up reading this stuff. It's mostly adventure, with only a little bit of science thrown in to make it colorful.

The story opens with a mysterious, deserted old mansion somewhere in an unnamed eastern state, and a hundred-year-old duty carried out by a lawyer whose great-grandfather was hired by a mysterious old man. (Lots of mystery right off the bat, you see.) On this particular day, the lawyer has to go to the old mansion and open a sealed crypt beneath it. What he finds there is a giant, god-like, apparently young man in a state of suspended animation. Of course the lawyer awakens him, as he's supposed to, turns over to him a mysterious package that contains a bracelet of an unknown alloy, and before you can say, "John Carter", our amnesiac hero is transported to an alien world where he finds himself in the middle of intrigue, danger, and romance.

You're either rolling your eyes by now at this brief description of the plot, or else you're remembering what it was like to be twelve years old and encountering a yarn like this for the first time. I would have been utterly enthralled, probably sitting in the rocking chair in my parents' living room and rocking back and forth so hard that my mother would gripe at me and tell me I was fixing to turn the chair over—which was known to happen from time to time.

There's a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs influence in this novel, as our hero, who dubs himself Bram Forest for reasons that make sense in the context of the story, finds himself in the middle of warring factions on the planet Tarth, which orbits the sun exactly opposite from Earth, which explains why we've never discovered it. (Isn't this the same gimmick that's used in the Gor books by John Norman? I only read the first one of those about fifty years ago and didn't care for it.) There are a couple of decent plot twists that set this apart from the John Carter series, though. There's also some Doc Savage influence with a hero raised from infancy to be a hero, an echo of Superman with a baby sent from one planet to another, and a lot of sword-and-planet swashbuckling of the sort that we've encountered many times from many authors, carried out at a competent level.

The quality of the writing definitely improves from the first installment to the second, but nobody reads this kind of yarn for fancy prose. The appeal of QUEST OF THE GOLDEN APE lies in its headlong pace, its colorful action, and its larger-than-life characters. The hero is mighty-thewed, the heroine is beautiful and often finds herself without clothes, the villains (including an evil queen) are truly despicable, and a rousing good time is had by all. At least, I had a rousing good time, and that's why I read books, after all.

QUEST OF THE GOLDEN APE has been reprinted once, and e-texts of it can be found in numerous places on-line. If you're capable of hearkening back to the era in which it originally appeared, you might enjoy it a great deal. I certainly did.

Forgotten Books: Recruit for Andromeda - Milton Lesser

(This post originally ran in slightly different form on November 2, 2005.)


This short novel was originally published in the July 1953 issue of the science-fiction digest IMAGINATION, under the title “Voyage to Eternity”. It was reprinted six years later as half of Ace Double D-358 as RECRUIT FOR ANDROMEDA. By the way, I think the magazine title is much better than the book title.


The plot won’t contain many surprises for anybody who has read much science-fiction. Approximately every two years, a certain number of healthy young males between the ages of 21 and 26 are selected in a national lottery and drafted to serve in some top-secret project. Supposedly a system is in place to rotate these men back out of the service, but in reality they all disappear and none of them ever come back. This has led the public to dub the project the Nowhere Journey (which also would have made an okay title). Unknown to anyone in America, the Communist empire in Russia has a similar project going on. Lesser cuts back and forth between an American draftee and a Russian one, and you know they’ll wind up butting heads sooner or later. Bit by bit, the reader is let in on the secrets of the Nowhere Journey, and everything finally comes together in a slam-bang space battle.


I’ve been aware for a long time that Stephen Marlowe, the author of the Gold Medal series about hardboiled private eye Chester Drum, was really Milton Lesser and that he started off writing science-fiction. Only in recent years, though, have I actually started to read some of Lesser’s SF and found out just how much of it he really wrote. He consistently turned out smooth, entertaining prose no matter what the genre, and that’s the case in this novel. Interestingly, there’s a little story-within-the-story in this book that echoes some of Lesser’s Gold Medal work as Marlowe. Although dated and fairly predictable, RECRUIT FOR ANDROMEDA is worth reading.


The cover of the Ace edition is by Emsh.