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 . . .   

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, February 25, 1939

My favorite era of ARGOSY is the mid-Thirties. Even in 1939 it was still a great pulp. This issue has a fine Viking cover by George Rozen and features stories by Jack Williamson, Richard Sale, Philip Ketchum, Robert Carse, Allan Vaughan Elston, Marco Page, Nard Jones, and a reprint by George W. Ogden. It would be hard to find a wider variety of adventure fiction than that, and all by top-notch authors, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, July 20, 1940

Foreign Legion covers showed up frequently on ARGOSY and ADVENTURE, but I don't recall seeing any on DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY until I came across this issue on the Fictionmags Index. I don't know who did the cover, but I think it's a pretty good one. It illustrates a story by Robert Carse, who did plenty of good Foreign Legion stories for ARGOSY. Since ARGOSY and DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY were both published by the Frank A. Munsey Company, it's possible Carse wrote this, sent it to ARGOSY, and somebody at Munsey decided to run it in DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY because of its title. Not that it matters, but I find speculation like that interesting. Also on hand in this issue are Hugh B. Cave, Lawrence Treat, David Goodis, Edward S. Aarons (writing as Edward Ronns), and Edwin Truett Long (writing as Edwin Truett). That's a really nice group of authors, and for a change, no serials! (Serials being the bane of a collector's existence, of course, and Munsey ran a ton of them.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, July 4, 1931

Yesterday's pulp was dated July 4, 1931, and so is today's. This is an All-Star Number of ARGOSY, according to the cover, and I can't argue with that claim. The cover is by Paul Stahr, who painted many great ones for ARGOSY, and inside are stories by H. Bedford-Jones, Theodore Roscoe, George F. Worts, Robert Carse, Ray Cummings, J.E. Grinstead, William Merriam Rouse, and Lt. John Hopper. You won't find a lineup of pulp authors much better than that one.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, March 1943

This is the final issue of ARGOSY published by the Frank A. Munsey Company before Popular Publications took over the magazine the next month. I used to own a copy of this issue--I remember that fine cover by Peter Stevens--but I don't think I ever got around to reading it. That's a shame, because inside are stories by H. Bedford-Jones, Norbert Davis, E. Hoffmann Price, Georges Surdez, Robert Carse, Tom W. Blackburn, William R. Cox, and Stewart Sterling. That's a great bunch of authors, but just par for the course where ARGOSY is concerned. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, March 10, 1934

A serial by H. Bedford-Jones called "Jungle Girl"? Why hasn't this been reprinted yet? Somebody needs to get on this. Elsewhere in this issue, behind the usual excellent cover by Paul Stahr, there are stories by Donald Barr Chidsey and Robert Carse and serial installments by W.C. Tuttle ("Buckshot", a title I'm not familiar with) and "George Challis", really Frederick Faust, of course ("The Naked Blade", his pirate novel featuring Ivor Kildare). Looks like a pretty strong issue to me. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, July 8, 1933

"World's End", the serial by Victor Rousseau that starts in this issue of ARGOSY, sounds pretty apocalyptic. The cover by Paul Stahr makes the situation look pretty dire, too. Maybe somebody who's read this one can tell us what it's about. Elsewhere in this issue are stories by Charles Alden Seltzer, Robert Carse, and George Worts writing as Loring Brent with an installment of a Peter the Brazen serial.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, December 23, 1939

The Christmas issue of ARGOSY from 1939, with one of Frank Richardson Pierce's No-Shirt McGee yarns as the featured story. From the looks of the titles, that's the only actual Christmas story, but since the other authors are Philip Ketchum, Robert Carse, Bennett Foster, Jack Mann, and Leslie T. White, it's probably a pretty good issue anyway.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, April 25, 1931

It may not be politically correct, but this is one of cleverest uses of the red sun motif on SHORT STORIES covers that I've come across. The art is by Remington Schuyler. Inside are stories by Robert Carse, Charles Alden Seltzer, Cliff Farrell, and several lesser known writers. I've enjoyed everything I've read by Carse, and I'll bet this is a good yarn, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, March 1943

By 1943, ARGOSY was owned by Popular Publications and was no longer a weekly, but it was still publishing plenty of good fiction. Consider the authors in this issue: H. Bedford-Jones, E. Hoffmann Price, Norbert Davis. William R. Cox, Georges Surdez, Tom W. Blackburn, Robert Carse, and Stewart Sterling. That's a really powerful line-up. Nice cover, too. I used to have this issue, but I don't believe I ever got around to reading it.

"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.