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, September 25, 1938

That's a dramatic cover by William F. Soare on this issue of SHORT STORIES. I always like seeing that red sun. There's a strong line-up of authors in this issue: Harry Sinclair Drago, Gordon Young, Frank Richardson Pierce, Warren Hastings Miller, Jackson Gregory, Lawrence Treat, H.S.M Kemp, and Captain Frederick Moore. Probably well worth reading with yarn-spinners like that. 

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 Afternoon Bonus Pulp: Blue Book, July 1937

I don't recall seeing many aviation-themed covers by Herbert Morton Stoops, but this is a good one. I really like the blend of colors on it. Not surprisingly for BLUE BOOK during this era, there are three H. Bedford-Jones stories in this issue--one under his own name, one under his name as well as that of his fictional collaborator Captain L.B. Williams, and one as Gordon Keyne. Other notable writers on hand are Warren Hastings Miller, Leland Jamieson, Kenneth Perkins, William Chester (with a Kioga story), and Robert R. Mill (with a Tiny David story). As a blend of the pulp and slick sensibilities, nothing else came close to BLUE BOOK.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Adventure, November 1, 1928

Gangway! I'm not sure why I like this cover by L.J. Cronin, an artist I'm not familiar with, but I really do. It just seems dynamic to me. And of course, ADVENTURE had some pretty dynamic authors in its pages, too, including in this issue Talbot Mundy, with a story featuring a character named Ben Quorn (also unfamiliar to me), Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Allan Vaughan Elston, Thomson Burtis, Bill Adams, and Warren Hastings Miller, among others.

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

THE MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE and its predecessor, ORIENTAL STORIES, didn't last very long--15 issues total--but they sure published some great stuff while they were around. The July 1933 issue of THE MAGIC CARPET MAGAZINE features a cover by J. Allen St. John and stories by H. Bedford-Jones, Robert E. Howard, E. Hoffmann Price, Geoffrey Vace (who was actually Hugh Cave's brother Geoffrey . . . or sometimes Hugh Cave . . . or sometimes both of them--I don't know who actually wrote this particular story), Clark Ashton Smith, and Warren Hastings Miller. What a fantastic bunch of authors! I've read the Bedford-Jones story in a Black Dog Books chapbook reprint, as well as the REH story, but none of the others. I'll bet they're all good, though.

Forgotten Books: Raider of the Seas - Warren Hastings Miller

Despite all the pulps I've read over the past 45 years or so, there are still a lot of pulp authors whose work I've never sampled. Until recently, Warren Hastings Miller fell into that category. I'm not sure I'd ever even heard of him until Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books published a volume of Miller's South Seas adventure yarns called RAIDER OF THE SEAS, which is now available in an e-book edition as well as its original print edition. Roberts provides an excellent introduction about Miller's life and work.

The stories in RAIDER OF THE SEAS feature Jim Colvin, the big, two-fisted captain of a tramp steamer, and his small but smart and scrappy chief engineer Johnny Pedlow. They encounter a dangerous array of pirates, wreckers, feuding sultans, and murderous natives but survive by a combination of courage, cunning, and fighting prowess.

A pair of unusual women also play important roles in these tales. Miss Jessie, who by her description sounds a lot like Aunt Bee from THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, is an American expatriate who can clean out a table full of tough sailors at poker or use a rifle to gun down a marauding pirate with equal coolness and skill. Lai Choi San is based on an actual female Malay pirate who also served as the model for Milton Caniff's classic character The Dragon Lady a few years after these stories of Miller's were published originally in the pulps FRONTIER STORIES and ALL-FICTION. (One side note: FRONTIER STORIES, which later became a Western pulp, started out as a magazine featuring stories in exotic settings all over the world, not just the Old West.)

Miller's style isn't fancy, nor are his plots complicated. But the stories race ahead with the sort of driving urgency that the pulps did so well, and they have an undeniable air of authenticity. Miller was personally familiar with these settings and was an expert on boats and sailing, including so much detail that sometimes a non-sailor like me doesn't really know what he's talking about. It's all clear enough from context, though, and anyway, the action doesn't slow down long enough to worry about things like that.

I don't know if any more collections of Miller's stories are in the works, but I'll certainly read them if they are. I really enjoyed RAIDER OF THE SEAS and give it a high recommendation.