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: Detective Tales, September 1939

I think this is a Tom Lovell cover on this issue of DETECTIVE TALES, but I'm not absolutely certain. I am certain, though, that there's a great lineup of authors in these pages: Norbert Davis, Cleve F. Adams, Wyatt Blassingame, William B. Rainey (also Wyatt Blassingame), Emile C. Tepperman, Philip Ketchum, William R. Cox, Stewart Sterling, and Ray Cummings. Every one of those guys was a prolific, top-notch pulpster, and I'm sure this was a well-above average issue. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Terror Tales, July 1935

Nobody could accuse TERROR TALES, or any of the other Weird Menace pulps, for that matter, of being subtle and restrained. That's certainly true of this cover by John Howitt, which is one of the more lurid that I recall. The lineup of authors inside this issue is pretty much an all-star one for this genre: Hugh B. Cave, Wyatt Blassingame, Wayne Rogers, Paul Ernst, Nat Schachner, and James A. Goldthwaite writing as Francis James. All those guys wrote other things, too, of course, but they were prolific and well-regarded contributors to the Weird Menace pulps.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Super-Detective, January 1943

I don’t own this issue, or, for that matter, any issues of SUPER-DETECTIVE. They’re not that easy to find, and they’re usually pretty expensive when you do come across one. But when Radio Archives recently published an e-book edition of this issue, I picked it up because I wanted to read the Jim Anthony novel in it. The by-line on that novel is John Grange, but that was a house-name, and in this case, I knew that two excellent authors collaborated on the story: Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard.

For those of you unfamiliar with Jim Anthony, here’s a little background. His father was an Irish adventurer, his mother a Comanche princess. He’s a millionaire industrialist with business interests all over the world, an amateur criminologist, a brilliant scientist, and a world-class athlete. He’s Doc Savage, Bruce Wayne, and Jim Thorpe rolled into one. Veteran pulpster Victor Rousseau wrote the first dozen Jim Anthony novels in SUPER-DETECTIVE, Edwin Truett Long did the next three, and then friends and sometime writing partners Bellem and Ballard wrote ten more novels to finish off the series. “Murder Between Shifts” in this issue is the fourth entry by Bellem and Ballard. In Rousseau’s stories, he portrayed Jim Anthony as more of a globe-trotting adventurer, the Doc Savage part of the character. I’d read that Bellem and Ballard’s novels had more of a mystery angle, concentrating on Jim Anthony’s efforts as a criminologist. I was eager to read one and find out.

“Murder Between Shifts” finds Jim visiting Los Angeles with his pilot and sidekick Tom Gentry. Jim owns an aircraft plant there that’s doing vital work for the war effort, but there are rumors of trouble he’s checking out, and sure enough, when he tracks down the plant manager to a nightclub that caters to the swing shift workers, the man is murdered right in front of Jim’s eyes by one of the other plant executives. The thing is, the guy who pulled the trigger claims he’s innocent! Jim investigates, of course, which leads to attempts on his own life along with sensuous encounters with several beautiful babes. (SUPER-DETECTIVE was published by the same company that put out the Spicy pulps, so it’s a little more risque than some, although mild by our current standards.) Even though Jim is still the same tycoon/scientist/criminologist he is in the earlier novels by Victor Rousseau, “Murder Between Shifts” does read much more like a typical hardboiled detective yarn than Rousseau’s novels do. It’s well-written, clever enough, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It also features a cameo appearance by police lieutenant Dave Donaldson, from Bellem’s Dan Turner series, which put a grin on my face.

William B. Rainey, author of the short story “Don’t Get Killed Tonight”, was really Wyatt Blassingame, best remembered probably for his Weird Menace stories although he was a prolific pulpster who wrote a little bit of everything and wrote it well. “Don’t Get Killed Tonight” is part of his series about private detective Eddie Harveth, who works as a troubleshooter for nightclub and restaurant owners in New Orleans. It’s a good story in which Eddie gets framed for the murder of a beautiful dancer and has to go on the run from the cops as he tracks down the real killer. There’s nothing unusual or special about this story, but it’s competently written and moves right along. A tad on the forgettable side, though.

Randolph Barr was a house-name, and the real author of “The Shape of Death” is unknown, which is a shame because it really is a top-notch story featuring some fine hardboiled writing. A beautiful blonde living in a Florida trailer camp finds a dead man on her doorstep. Unfortunately, he’d made a pass at her a short time earlier in a nearby tavern, and she was heard to threaten him. The cops believe he followed her back to her trailer and she killed him, possibly in self-defense. The only one who believes she’s innocent is a young reporter who falls for her. The plot of this one is pretty traditional and even predictable, but it races along with plenty of good dialogue and excellent descriptions. I liked it a lot and wish I knew who wrote it.

The other stories in this issue are all unacknowledged reprints, a practice for which the publisher was notorious, beginning with “Carte Blanche for Murder” by Travis Lee Stokes, which was published originally as “Blonde Madness” in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES under the name Arthur Humbolt, which was also a pseudonym. The real author was Robert C. Blackmon, who wrote a bunch of detective yarns for various pulps, under numerous different names. It opens with its newspaper reporter protagonist discovering the murdered body of a beautiful blonde with her arms chopped off. Naturally, this ties in with the case of another blonde who was killed and had her legs chopped off. And our hero’s girlfriend is a beautiful blonde and has a connection with one of the suspects! As you can tell, this story is lurid and over the top and you know exactly what’s going on almost right from the start, but Blackmon delivers it in such breathless, enthusiastic prose that it’s enjoyable despite that.

Norman A. Daniels is the actual author of “Murder Stays at Home”, published in this issue under the name Max Neilson. It was published originally as “Murder at Lake Iroquois” by Charles Maxwell in the September 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES. This one finds a bunch of theater folks and artists partying at the island mansion of a wealthy producer, and of course one of them winds up dead, seemingly an open-and-shut case of a beautiful actress murdering a rival beautiful actress. That’s not how it turns out, and the murder method is actually pretty clever. Daniels was dependable and this story is good entertainment without being outstanding.

“Post Mortem” by Walton Grey was published originally in the August 1934 issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES as “Where is the Body?”, under the author’s real name, C. Samuel Campbell. It’s even more lurid and over-the-top than “Carte Blanche for Murder” as we have two police detectives running around a stereotypical old dark house complete with secret passages and a hulking monster who’s breaking people’s necks. This one is almost too silly for me to accept it, but it has its effective moments and I wound up reading the whole thing.

Looking back on the issue as a whole, it’s certainly entertaining. The Jim Anthony story and “The Shape of Death” by “Randolph Barr” are the highlights. I definitely want to read more of Bellem and Ballard’s Jim Anthony stories. Several of them, including “Murder Between Shifts”, are reprinted in SUPER-DETECTIVE JIM ANTHONY, THE COMPLETE SERIES: VOLUME 5 from Steeger Books. Not surprisingly, I’ve already ordered a copy. But if you want to sample the series, this e-book from Radio Archives isn’t a bad place to start.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Tales, August 1935

This issue of DETECTIVE TALES starts off with a good, dramatic cover by Walter Baumhofer and has a strong line-up of authors inside: top pulpsters Frederick C. Davis, Norvell Page, Paul Ernst, Wyatt Blassingame, Franklin H. Martin, J. Lane Linklater, R.T.M. Scott, and George Armin Shaftel (once as himself and once under the pseudonym George Rosenberg), plus lesser-known George Edson and Wilton Hazzard along with house-name Emerson Graves. Davis, Page, Blassingame, and Ernst would make this pulp well worth reading for me if I owned a copy, which I don't.

Slaves of the Blood Wolves - Robert Weinberg, ed.

This is a modern-day reprint published by Wildside Press of a collection originally edited and published by Robert Weinberg in 1979 that reprinted four Weird Menace pulp stories from the Thirties. The Weinberg edition has a very nice cover by Stephen Fabian that the Wildside Press reprint also uses. This collection features four authors who were million-words-a-year guys, or close to it, anyway.

The author who leads off this collection, Arthur J. Burks, definitely produced more than a million words a year for a number of years during the pulp era. He wrote all types of stories, as well: detective, aviation, adventure, science fiction, even a few Westerns and sports yarns. He was a prolific contributor to the Weird Menace pulps. His story “Slaves of the Blood Wolves” appeared in the December 1935 issue of TERROR TALES. It’s about a doctor and nurse flying into a blizzard to reach a remote Canadian settlement where the doctor’s father once lived. The people there are beset by two calamities: a mysterious wasting disease and the threat from a horde of starving, blood-hungry wolves. Things turn nasty quickly, as you might expect. Unlike most Weird Menace stories, there’s no real mystery or Scooby Doo ending in this one, just pure action and horror. It’s well-written but maybe a little too over the top for my tastes. (Yes, such a thing is possible, believe it or not.)

Wyatt Blassingame had a great career in the pulps, writing hundreds of detective, Western, and sports stories in addition to being one of the leading authors of Weird Menace yarns. His novelette “Satan Sends a Woman” appeared in the January 1936 issue of TERROR TALES. In it, two-fisted adventurer Ed Roland explores a sinister Alabama swamp where several men have disappeared. The swamp is also the only way to reach an area of the coast where a ship carrying a fortune in pearls is supposed to have run aground some years earlier. Not only does Roland have to deal with the regular dangers that a swamp poses (snakes, alligators, quicksand, etc.), but he also encounters a strangely beautiful young woman who may not be what she seems. Like the Burks yarn that precedes it in this collection, “Satan Sends a Woman” doesn’t really follow the Weird Menace formula, but it’s well-written and gallops along in an entertaining fashion. I’ve read quite a few stories by Blassingame in the past few years and always enjoy his work.

Norvell Page is best known for writing most of the Spider novels, of course, but he wrote a bunch of other stuff for the pulps, including stories for some of the Weird Menace magazines. His novella “The Red Eye of Rin-Po-Che” appeared in the November 1939 issue of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Its protagonist is globe-trotting Irish adventurer Moriarity O’Moore, who is in a New York City nightclub one evening when a beautiful young woman jumps up from a table as he’s passing by, throws her arms around him, and kisses him like he’s her long-lost lover. Only thing is, O’Moore has never laid eyes on her before. But the man she’s with is a sinister-looking bozo, and when she begs O’Moore for help, you know he’s going to play along with the gag, whatever it is. And so off we gallop into a yarn that’s almost non-stop action as O’Moore battles to save a beautiful girl and a fabulously valuable ruby from the evil clutches of some cultists and their high priest. As with the first two stories in this collection, “The Red Eye of Rin-Po-Che” isn’t a standard Weird Menace yarn, either, and it probably would have been more at home in a detective pulp or some magazine like ARGOSY. But I’m not complaining, because this is a great tale that reminds us Norvell Page was one of the top action writers in the pulps, right up there with Robert E. Howard and Lester Dent. There’s a second Moriarty O’Moore story, “The Red Eye of Kali”, which also appeared in DIME MYSTERY a year later, in the November 1940 issue, but it appears never to have been reprinted.

This collection wraps up with “Girl of the Goat-God” by Arthur Leo Zagat, one of the top names in Weird Menace pulps and also the author of numerous detective, science fiction, and adventure yarns. Originally published in the November 1935 issue of DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE, this story actually does fall firmly within the usual Weird Menace boundaries: there’s a sinister old house with some sinister gardens, a statue of Pan that may be coming to life and killing people, a swamp, a beautiful young woman with a menacing aunt, a stalwart hero who loves the girl, and a herd of goats that stampedes at the worst possible time. All of it told in Zagat’s slick, breathless prose that makes the pages just race by. Anybody who has read many Weird Menace stories will figure out the ending pretty quickly, but that doesn’t matter. The fun lies in how Zagat gets there, and it’s a lot of fun indeed.

As we’ve seen, SLAVES OF THE BLOOD WOLVES isn’t really that representative of the Weird Menace genre, but every story in it is very well-written and highly entertaining. My favorite is the Norvell Page yarn with its fantastic action and pace, but the other stories are all well worth reading as well. For pulp fans, I give this collection a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Mystery, December 1935

This is the second issue of THRILLING MYSTERY, launched by the Thrilling Group to compete with the success of Popular Publications’ leading Weird Menace pulp DIME MYSTERY. I don’t know who did the cover, but it’s plenty garish and eye-catching. An e-book reprint of this pulp is available from Radio Archives, so being both time- and attention span-challenged, I read it recently.

Wyatt Blassingame was one of the top Weird Menace authors over at Popular, so it’s no surprise to find him leading off this issue with a novelette called “The Flame Demon”. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Blassingame, but unfortunately, this yarn about a villain calling himself the God of Fire comes across to me as pretty uninspired. There are some nice action scenes—lots of big fires, and the protagonist finds himself in a really harrowing position—but Blassingame seems to have phoned in the muddled plot, which requires quite a bit of unconvincing exposition in the final pages to explain. I don’t have any way of knowing, of course, but I suspect that Rogers Terrill at Popular rejected this story and Harvey Burns, the editor at THRILLING MYSTERY, snapped it up because of Blassingame’s name recognition in the genre.

“Voice From Hell”, a short story by Jack D’Arcy (really D.L. Champion, creator of the Phantom Detective), is a Poe-like tale with a clever twist to it about a murderer tormented by his crime. It’s a slight but enjoyable story and an improvement over Blassingame’s novelette.

This issue really begins to pick up steam with “Ghouls of the Green Web”, a novelette from the dependable G.T. Fleming-Roberts. It’s set in a small Kansas city during the Dust Bowl, one of the few pulp stories I’ve read to use that bit of real-life history in its plot. Fleming-Roberts does a really nice job with it, too. The writing is excellent. Fleming-Roberts’ prose can be lurid, over the top, and genuinely creepy when it needs to be, and then turn around and achieve a terse, hardboiled, poetic effect. The menace seems a bit more realistic than some, as well. I really enjoyed this one.

I don’t know anything about James Duncan, author of the novelette “Blood in the Night” except that his real name was Arthur Pincus and that he wrote dozens of mystery, detective, and Weird Menace stories for a variety of pulps. His story in this issue is a bit of a kitchen-sink tale, with a witch’s curse, murders that appear to have been committed by a vampire, and an old house full of heirs to a fortune who benefit by knocking each other off, a set-up reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel, plus a master detective who is, at least, nothing like Hercule Poirot. Duncan pulls it all together and makes it work in a reasonably entertaining fashion.

Likewise, I know very little about Saul W. Paul, author of the short story “Forest of Fear”. That appears to have been his real name, and he sold about a dozen stories in the Thirties, mostly to the Spicy pulps. This story, about a honeymooning young couple who encounter a deadly menace in the woods, is only borderline Weird Menace and has nothing even apparently supernatural about it, but it does strike a few nicely creepy notes.

Arthur J. Burks was a million-words-a-year man, so I’m surprised I haven’t read more by him, only a few stories here and there. His novelette in this issue, “Demons in the Dust”, is another Dust Bowl yarn, but Burks carries the situation so far that this story reads more like post-apocalyptic science fiction than Weird Menace. And as post-apocalyptic SF, it’s not bad, although the plot—the protagonist and his newlywed wife try to escape from a particularly bad dust storm—is a little thin. But there’s lots of action and it’s well-written, making for a bleak but satisfying tale.

H.M. Appel is another author I’m not familiar with, except for seeing on the Fictionmags Index that he wrote several dozen stories for various Weird Menace and detective pulps. His short story “Hooks of Death” isn’t really Weird Menace, either, despite being fairly grisly in places. It’s about a young highway patrolman’s pursuit of a serial killer stalking a particular stretch of road. The prose has plenty of momentum and the hero’s background furnishes a nice twist.

Jack Williamson isn’t a name I expected to encounter in the Table of Contents in a Weird Menace pulp, but in addition to being one of the giants of science fiction, Williamson also wrote a considerable amount of fantasy and horror, so it’s not that much of a stretch. His novelette “Grey Arms of Death” is about some very Cthulhu-like creatures from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean stalking some deep-sea explorers and invading a lonely cliffside mansion. I don’t know if Williamson ever read Lovecraft, but based on this story I feel like there’s a good chance he did. This is pure Weird Menace, and Williamson, already a very seasoned pro in 1935, throws himself into the breakneck, lurid prose with great gusto. This is a fast-moving and very entertaining story, probably my favorite in the whole issue.

Overall, this issue of THRILLING MYSTERY is a satisfying read, even though some of the stories don’t fit the Weird Menace genre that well. I have no way of knowing, but since it was only the second issue, I suspect that the stories by Duncan, Paul, and Appel were intended originally for POPULAR DETECTIVE or possibly as back-ups in THE PHANTOM DETECTIVE and were pulled out of inventory to go in THRILLING MYSTERY. But that’s pure speculation on my part.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery, July 1942

By the middle of 1942, DIME MYSTERY wasn't really a Weird Menace pulp anymore, but some influences still remained. Some of the Weird Menace authors moved right on over into writing more traditional mystery yarns, although judging by the titles, some bizarre elements remained. Wyatt Blassingame is an example in this issue, with a story called "Death Doesn't Care". Another story, "Satan Rocks the Casket", sounds even more like a Weird Menace story, but since the author is Francis K. Allan (not known as a Weird Menace guy) writing as Joe Kent, it's unlikely this story strays too far from the usual detective pulp fare. Allan has another story in this issue under his own name. Also on hand are Day Keene, William R. Cox, and William Campbell Gault, and that's a great trio of authors right there. I don't know the cover artist, but he (or she) turned in a dramatic image. Mummy cases always mean trouble.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask, August 1940

BLACK MASK was past its glory days by 1940 but still producing good issues like this one, with an eye-catching Rafael DeSoto cover and some excellent authors inside: George Harmon Coxe with a Flashgun Casey story, Roger Torrey, Stewart Sterling, Wyatt Blassingame, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, and the lesser-known Eaton K. Goldthwaite. If you want to read this issue, it's available on-line.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, September 1948

One of Popular Publications' flagship Western pulps, along with DIME WESTERN, STAR WESTERN was still going strong in the late Forties, with this issue being a prime example. Behind that dramatic Robert Stanley cover are stories by a really fine group of writers: T.T. Flynn, Tom W. Blackburn, Frank Bonham, Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame), John Jo Carpenter (John Reese), Kenneth Perkins, and writer/editor Art Lawson with two stories, one under his name and one as by William Fargo.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, November 1938

Looks like the Skipper traded Gilligan for a different little buddy. I'm talking about the monkey, of course. This is another good cover by H.J. Ward on one of the Spicy pulps. The stories inside this issue of SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES are all by stalwarts of the Spicy line: Robert Leslie Bellem, E. Hoffmann Price, Victor Rousseau (as Hugh Speer), Edwin Truett Long (as Jose Vaca), Laurence Donovan (as Larry Dunn), and Wyatt Blassingame (as William B. Rainey).

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dime Mystery Magazine, July 1940

Rafael De Soto provides not only some action and a good-looking redhead, but also some downright weirdness in this cover for DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE. The Weird Menace boom was just about over by the time this pulp was published, but you can still see its lingering influence in the cover and the story titles. There are some excellent authors in this issue: Bruno Fischer (as Russell Gray), Wyatt Blassingame, Stewart Sterling, Ralph Oppenheim (best remembered for his aviation yarns), and the lesser-known Costa Carousso and W. Wayne Robbins.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Dime Western Magazine, June 1946

I'm not quite sure of everything that's going on, but dang, what a great cover anyway! Pure action and drama. I'm sure there's a lot of that in the stories in this issue of DIME WESTERN, too, since the authors are Walt Coburn, Harry F. Olmsted, Frank Bonham, William R. Cox, Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame), and Ralph Perry. By this point, Coburn (supposedly) wasn't at the top of his game because of his drinking, but I still enjoy his work from all eras of his career.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy-Adventure Stories, January 1936

Another great Parkhurst cover on this issue of SPICY-ADVENTURE STORIES. Inside are yarns by the usual assortment of authors: Robert Leslie Bellem (as himself and Jerome Severs Perry), Victor Rousseau (as Lew Merrill and Hugh Speer), Wyatt Blassingame (as William B. Rainey), Arthur Wallace, W.W. McKenna, and two authors who have no credits in the Fictionmags Index except their stories in this issue, George Herreford and Lance LeCamp, so both of those names may well be pseudonyms.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crime Busters, June 1938

The cover's not bad on this issue of CRIME BUSTERS (I don't know the artist), but man, look at the authors and series inside: Lester Dent with a Click Rush story, Walter B. Gibson (as Maxwell Grant) with a Norgil the Magician story, Norvell Page with a story featuring Angus Saint Cloud, the Death Angel (don't know this series, but what a great name!), Theodore Tinsley with a Carrie Cashin story, plus yarns by Frank Gruber, Wyatt Blassingame, and Arthur J. Burks. This looks like an absolutely great issue.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Star Western, August 1953

This is a pretty sedate cover, but I like it a lot anyway. There's a nice sense of impending menace to it, and that's a really beautiful woman. I don't know the artist. The authors inside this issue of STAR WESTERN are good ones, as well: Joseph Chadwick, Will Cook, Frank Castle, J.L. Bouma, Van Cort (Wyatt Blassingame), Kenneth L. Sinclair, and Cy Kees. Even this late in the game, STAR WESTERN was a very good Western pulp.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Mystery Tales, June 1938

MYSTERY TALES is one of the lesser-known Weird Menace pulps, although you certainly couldn't tell that by the talent associated with this issue. The lurid cover is by the great Norman Saunders, and inside are stories by some top pulpsters, including Henry Kuttner, Wyatt Blassingame, John H. Knox, Walter Ripperger, Cyril Plunkett, and Hal K. Wells.

Detective Tales, December 1940

I don't know who the artist is, but this cover is dynamic and eye-catching, so I guess it did it's job. There are some excellent authors in this issue of DETECTIVE TALES, including Wyatt Blassingame (twice, as himself and as Willliam B. Rainey) and Philip Ketchum, as well as some lesser-knowns such as Dane Gregory, Don James, and Edward S. Williams. I'd never heard of Tiah Devitt before and was surprised that she would get such a prominent cover mention. Turns out she was an actress who appeared once on Broadway and wrote a couple of dozen stories for assorted pulps and slicks from the Thirties to the Fifties.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top Detective Annual, 1952

That line "The Year's Best Mystery Story Anthology" makes it sound like the stories in this pulp are the best (in the editor's judgment) published in the past year, right? Well, you'd be wrong if you thought that. This is actually just a regular reprint pulp, with stories that go back to 1934 in their original appearances. Most are from various Thrilling Group pulps published during the Forties. But I'm willing to overlook that bit of hyperbole when you get a good Sam Cherry cover, along with writers such as Fredric Brown, William Campbell Gault, Murray Leinster, Stewart Sterling, Wyatt Blassingame, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Dwight V. Babcock, Ray Cummings, and Joe Archibald. The stories may be reprints, but if you haven't read them before, they're new. And those are some good authors. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Private Detective Stories, January 1945

That's a nice cover by Richard Lillis, an artist I'm not familiar with, on this issue of PRIVATE DETECTIVE STORIES. There's so much red and yellow on there I almost feel like I'm looking at a Western pulp cover. This issue is kind of an oddity in that there are no stories by Robert Leslie Bellem. However, the lineup of authors is still a good one: Roger Torrey, Wyatt Blassingame, Howard Wandrei (as Robert A. Garron), Victor Rousseau (as Lew Merrill), and lesser known writers Geoffrey North, Rex Whitechurch, and Donald C. Cameron.