Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask, September 1933

What would 20 cents buy in 1933? Well, it would buy a lot of things I suppose, but one possible answer is that it would buy an issue of BLACK MASK with stories by Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, W.T. Ballard, Roger Torrey, and Eugene Cunningham. That's just a spectacular group of authors. Cunningham is best remembered as a Western author, but he wrote quite a few hardboiled yarns, too. His story in this issue is the first in a series about hotel detective Cleve Corby. Nebel's story is part of his Kennedy and McBride series, Gardner's features the phantom crook Ed Jenkins, Ballard writes about Hollywood troubleshooter Bill Lennox, Torrey's story is about policeman Dal Prentice, and Whitfield's is the first of two about private eye Dion Davies. Several of the stories from this issue have been reprinted, and I'm sure they're well worth seeking out. By the way, the cover of this issue is by J.W. Schlaikjer, who did quite a few covers for BLACK MASK during this era.

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: Thrilling Detective, December 1935

This issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE sports a gruesome but eye-catching and dramatic cover by Rafael DeSoto. Nothing good ever comes from a suit of armor on a pulp cover! Inside this issue are stories by Barry Perowne (a Raffles yarn), Arthur J. Burks, Steve Fisher, Dwight V. Babcock, John Scott Douglas, Paul Hawk, Edmond Du Perrier, and the oddly named Tom Erwin Geris, who, if you rearrange the letters, turns out to be none other than Mort Weisinger, who wrote quite a few pulp stories but is best remembered as the long-time editor of the Superman titles at DC Comics during the Silver Age. He had a reputation as quite a curmudgeon as far as the writers and artists were concerned, but I didn't know any of that at the time. I just read the comic books and enjoyed them. I don't believe I've ever read any of his pulp stories, though. 

Review: The Deadly Combo - Jack Webb

When I started reading hardboiled mysteries in junior high, I thought Jack Webb, author of the series featuring priest/detective duo Father Joseph Shanley and Sammy Golden, was the same guy as Jack Webb the star of DRAGNET (and some excellent movies like PETE KELLY’S BLUES and -30-, but I hadn’t seen those yet). It didn’t take long to figure out that Webb the novelist was a totally different person. I read a few of his novels, which were easy to find in those days in their Signet paperback reprint editions, and remember enjoying them. But I hadn’t read anything else by him, as far as I recall, in the 50+ years since then.

Until Stark House recently reprinted two of Webb’s stand-alone novels in a handsome double volume, THE DEADLY COMBO and ONE FOR MY DAME. I started with THE DEADLY COMBO, originally published as half of an Ace Double mystery under Webb’s John Farr pseudonym. The novel opens with the discovery of a corpse in the alley behind a Los Angeles jazz club. The victim is a former jazz musician named Dandy Mullens. The cop who catches the case is Mac Stewart, a big, ugly, former prizefighter who happens to be a jazz aficionado himself and a friend of the murdered man. Mac’s quest to catch Dandy’s killer reminded me a little of how Mike Hammer often set out to avenge the murder of a friend.

Mac’s investigation takes him through a series of jazz clubs, strip joints, and fancy apartments, from the sleazy and sordid to the high class (but perhaps no less sordid). It seems there’s a legend in the jazz world that Dandy owned a solid gold trumpet, given to him as a publicity stunt decades earlier when he was one of the top musicians in the world, rather than the washed-up bum he was when he was killed. Somebody wanted that trumpet bad enough to kill for it, Mac believes, but at the same time, he happens to know that the whole story is a myth. Or is it? Halfway through this novel, the plot takes an abrupt but believable twist, and things that seemed apparent suddenly aren’t. Mac will have a lot to untangle to find the killer, if he lives long enough himself.

THE DEADLY COMBO is both a fast-paced, violent, hardboiled mystery and a love letter to jazz music, all at the same time. Mac Stewart is a great character, a bit of an intellectual as well as a tough, hard-nosed cop. Webb’s style in this novel is the prose equivalent of jazz, swooping and swirling almost into a stream-of-consciousness improvisation at times. It takes a little getting used to, but it works and is very effective. The plot winds up almost as dense and convoluted as a Ross Macdonald novel, but I think it all makes sense in the end.

What I know for certain is that I raced through THE DEADLY COMBO and really enjoyed it. I stayed up later than I normally do to finish it, and that takes a pretty compelling book at my age. The Stark House double volume, complete with a top-notch introduction by Nicholas Litchfield, is available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon. I’ll be reading ONE FOR MY DAME soon.

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: All-Story Detective, December 1949

ALL-STORY DETECTIVE was a short-lived Popular Publications detective pulp that ran for six issues in the late Forties. This was the last issue under that title. The magazine became 15 STORY DETECTIVE but managed only eight issues under that title. But many of the covers were by Norman Saunders, including this "What the heck is going on here?" number, and there were some good authors in its pages. In this issue, those authors include Frederick C. Davis, Bryce Walton, Bruce Cassiday, and Stuart Friedman, as well as lesser-known authors Robert Carlton, Ed Barcelo, and Robert F. Toombs. Like most of the short-run pulps, I'm sure many of the stories were good and the magazines failed for other reasons.

Review: Dream Town - David Baldacci

DREAM TOWN is the third and for the moment final book in David Baldacci’s series about Aloysius Archer, ex-GI, ex-con, and as this book opens on New Year’s Eve 1952, a private detective working for an agency in Bay Town, California, up the coast from Los Angeles. But Archer is in L.A. to celebrate the new year with his friend, actress Liberty Callahan. While they’re having dinner at Chasen’s, a female screenwriter who knows Liberty joins the pair briefly and, finding out that Archer is a private eye, hires him to find out who’s responsible for some vaguely threatening things that have happened to her lately.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, before 1953 has hardly gotten started, there’s been a murder and Archer has literally tripped over the body, just before (of course) he gets hit on the head and knocked out. That’s just the beginning of an extremely complex plot featuring, as they say, a cast of thousands. Well, not quite, but sometimes it almost feels that way. There are a lot of characters to keep up with in this book as Archer’s investigation takes him from the highest planes of Hollywood royalty to a bunch of down-and-dirty, very dangerous characters—and sometimes those are one and the same.

Okay, obligatory complaint about how the book is too long. It is, but the plot almost justifies the length in this one. For the first half of the book, things seem relatively simple, but then Baldacci throws in twist after twist, to the point that I almost felt like I was reading an Erle Stanley Gardner book. I had a really strong hunch that the whole thing was going to go off the rails sooner or later, too, but Baldacci makes it all make sense.

With that plot, setting, and time period, you know I’m the target audience for this book. All three of the Archer books seem heavily influenced by Raymond Chandler, and that influence is really strong in this one. Archer is an excellent protagonist, smart enough and tough enough to survive but not a superhero by any means. He’s pretty good with the banter, too. Baldacci does a good job capturing the early Fifties, other than one anachronism.

The first two books in this series are ONE GOOD DEED and A GAMBLING MAN, and I enjoyed both of them. DREAM TOWN is even better and ends on a great note for sequels. Baldacci has said he’s going to write more about the character. I really hope he does. You can get this one in e-book, audiobook, hardcover, or paperback, and if you’re a fan of private eye fiction in the classic style (even if it’s not old enough to actually be called a classic yet), I give it a high recommendation.

Review: The Red Tassel - David Dodge

THE RED TASSEL is the third and final novel by David Dodge to feature Al Colby, a private detective/troubleshooter who works primarily for U.S. business interests in South America. It was published in hardcover by Random House in 1950 and reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1952 with a cover by Robert Stanley. The same Stanley cover art graces the recent reprint from the fine folks at Black Gat Books, which is available in paperback from Amazon and also includes an excellent introduction by Randal S. Brandt.

In this novel, Al Colby, who is a very likable narrator/protagonist, is hired by beautiful redhead Pancha Porter, who inherited a lead and silver mine in the mountains of Bolivia from her father. The mine’s production has dropped dramatically, and Pancha wants Al to find out why and put a stop to it. The situation is complicated, as far as Al is concerned, by Pancha’s insistence on traveling to the mine with him. And since she’s footing the bill, he can’t really say no.

They run into trouble before they even arrive and meet all the colorful characters at the mine and the nearby village of Indian workers. Those colorful characters include a witch doctor who holds a grudge against Pancha’s late father, a neurotic young man and his overprotective mother, assorted surly servants and employees, and an old woman who wanders around acting like a lunatic . It’ll come as no surprise to most readers that a murder takes place sooner rather than later, and Al find himself in deadly danger more than once.

Dodge and his family lived in South America and the setting for this novel is based on a real place. You can tell that from the excellent descriptive writing. THE RED TASSEL is well-plotted, too, not extraordinarily complex but always solid and intriguing. I figured out the killer’s identity and most of what was going on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this book even a little bit. That’s how good the characters and the writing are.

Dodge is best remembered for his novel TO CATCH A THIEF, which served as the basis for the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. I haven’t read that one, but I have read the second Al Colby novel, PLUNDER OF THE SUN (also a movie) and the posthumously published THE LAST MATCH. I really liked both of those books, too. I need to read more by David Dodge. I thoroughly enjoyed THE RED TASSEL and give it a high recommendation. It’s a smoothly told, very entertaining tale.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, March 28, 1931

This isn't a particularly dramatic Mountie cover on this issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, but I don't recall coming across a Mountie on a DFW cover before, so I find it interesting. I don't know who painted it. There's certainly a decent group of authors in this issue, including Hulbert Footner, Fred MacIsaac, J. Allan Dunn, J. Lane Linklater, and Edward Parrish Ware. Those are all prolific, well-respected pulpsters. I don't own this issue, but I think it would be worth reading if I did. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Action Stories, October 1936

This Popular Publications detective pulp was never very successful, having two short runs during the Thirties. This issue is from the second incarnation of DETECTIVE ACTION STORIES. The cover, which admittedly is pretty striking, is credited to someone named A. Nelson. This is the only listing in the Fictionmags Index for whoever that was. As for the authors inside, Ray Cummings is probably the biggest name, although Walter Ripperger was fairly prolific and popular, too. Also, one of the authors, William Moulton Marston, went on to create the iconic comic book character Wonder Woman a few years later. Other authors on hand are Victor Maxwell, Arthur V. Chester, William Corcoran, and Richard L. Hobart. Chester's story is featured on the cover despite the fact that he sold only five stories to the pulps and couldn't have been considered a big name. But the story inspired a good cover.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Clues Detective Stories, November 1938

Well, that's certainly an eye-catching cover. I don't know who painted it, but it would have made me curious about the story, that's for sure. Since Donald Wandrei wrote that cover story, it's probably pretty good. The other authors in this issue are top-notch, as well: Frank Gruber, Cornell Woolrich, Edward S. Aarons (as Edward Ronns), and J.J. des Ormeaux, who was really Forrest Rosaire. I've never read any of Wandrei's Cyrus North stories and don't know anything about the series, but I've always found Wandrei to be a dependable author. I don't own this issue, or any other issues of CLUES DETECTIVE STORIES, for that matter. The Internet Archive has some of them posted (not this one). I ought to give them a try, one of these days.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, November 1937

I don't know who did the cover on this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE, but it's intriguing. And they definitely want you to that there's a Charlie Chan story in this issue, since it's mentioned twice. However (and that's a big however), it's not a lost tale by Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers, who died four years earlier in 1933. No, this story featuring Charlie Chan was written by journeyman pulpster Edward Churchill. Now, I usually enjoy Churchill's work and this may well be a good story, but I have to wonder if publisher Ned Pines cut a deal with Biggers' estate to publish a new Chan story, or if he just did it anyway. We'll probably never know. At any rate, it's the only non-Biggers entry in the series until the 1970s, when several different authors wrote Chan stories for CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Which, come to think of it, was owned and published by Leo Margulies, who worked as editorial director for Ned Pines. Hmmm. Anyway, elsewhere in this issue are stories by T.T. Flynn, one of my favorite Western writers who also did mysteries and detective yarns, Robert Sidney Bowen, and Ray Cummings. That's a talented bunch.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Spicy Detective Stories, November 1936

I don’t own this pulp, but I recently read a PDF of it downloaded from the Internet Archive. The cover is by Delos Palmer.

Evidently Alan Anderson was a real guy. There’s no indication in the Fictionmags Index that it’s a house-name. He’s the author of the first story in this issue, “The Woman in Yellow”, which is about an American spy trying to retrieve an envelope full of vital military plans from a beautiful brunette while they travel on the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. Our protagonist has a partner in this assignment, a beautiful blonde who’s a nightclub dancer in addition to being a spy. Naturally, seeing as this is a Spicy Pulp, both gals manage to lose some of their clothes during the course of the story. The plot is pretty interesting, with a semi-clever twist at the end, but the writing isn’t very good. It’s choppy and hard to follow in places. Not a bad effort, but not a particularly good one, either.

“Killer’s Price” is the first of three stories in this issue by my old buddy Edwin Truett Long. I refer to him as my buddy because I’m starting to feel a real kinship with the guy despite the fact that he died eight years before I was born. But he lived in the North Texas area for a good part of his life, including some time in Fort Worth. He wrote fast, in a variety of genres, and I can see myself having the same sort of career if I’d been born earlier. “Killer’s Price” is bylined Mort Lansing, one of Long’s regular pseudonyms, and it’s part of his series about private detective Mike Cockrell. As the story opens, Mike is on vacation in a coastal city pretty clearly modeled after Corpus Christi when he gets involved in the kidnapping of a millionaire’s daughter. There are a couple of other beautiful blondes mixed up in the deal, along with a villainous bartender and a gang boss. Mike is kept hopping as he tries to straighten out this mess. The story is plotted pretty loosely, but the action races along at breakneck speed and the banter is good. This one is a considerable step up from Anderson’s story.

Next up is a story by that stalwart of the Spicy Pulps, Robert Leslie Bellem, and it features his iconic private detective character Dan Turner. In “Murder for Metrovox”, a beautiful movie star takes a high dive from a high rise and winds up not so beautiful. Was her death suicide—or murder? At the same time, Dan is already mixed up in the case of a missing starlet, and there’s a beautiful stag movie actress involved as well. Naturally, Dan sorts everything out, but not before coming up with good excuses for the still-living babes to take their clothes off, and he manages to guzzle down a bottle of Vat 69 while he’s at it, too. Dan was one of the original multi-taskers. As usual with Bellem’s work, this is a well-plotted, if slightly predictable, yarn. The wackiness seems toned down a little, but it’s great fun to read anyway. I’ve never read a bad Dan Turner story.

“Traitor’s Gold” is by Hamlin Daly, which was a pseudonym for E. Hoffmann Price. Price wrote a lot for the Spicy Pulps under his own name, but Hamlin Daly shows up quite a bit, too. “Traitor’s Gold” is a nighttime romp through a spooky old mansion in the Hudson Valley that’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered millionaire who owned it. He had a beautiful daughter, too, and our detective protagonist is in love with her and determined to trap the ghost who’s causing trouble. This isn’t top of the line work from Price, but it moves right along and has a decent plot. I liked it without being overly impressed by it.

The next story in this issue is another of Edwin Truett Long’s contributions, this time writing under the name Cary Moran. “Murder in Music” features sheriff’s department investigator Jarnegan, who only investigates murders. I read this one several years ago in a Black Dog Books chapbook that reprinted several of the Jarnegan stories, and here’s what I said about it then: “Murder in Music” finds Jarnegan investigating the death of a drummer from a jazz band visiting the city. It appears that the man was frightened to death by voodoo. But all is not as it appears, of course, and another band member soon turns up dead, giving Jarnegan two murders to solve.

Harley Tate and Diana Ware are partners in a private detective agency, and in “The Taveta Necklace”, they’re hired to keep a fabulously valuable necklace from being stolen during a high society party. Naturally, trouble ensues, including several murders, in this fast-paced, entertaining yarn that’s credited to George Sanders. In fact, it’s the only piece of fiction credited to Sanders in the Fictionmags Index, and there was one other Harley Tate/Diana Ware yarn published under the name Alan Anderson, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that this George Sanders was a pseudonym. Did Alan Anderson write this one, too? Now that I don’t know. I liked it considerably better and thought it was better written than Anderson’s “The Woman in Yellow”, elsewhere in this issue. This will probably have to go down as another unsolved mystery of the Spicy Pulps, though.

“Death on the Half Shell” is the third Edwin Truett Long story in this issue. It’s part of the Johnny Harding series, which, haphazardly enough, was published under three different pseudonyms during its run: Cary Moran, Mort Lansing, and Carl Moore, the byline on this particular story. Johnny Harding is a feisty little gossip columnist who frequently stumbles over dead bodies. He’s the protagonist of Long’s novel KILLER’S CARESS, which was published under the Cary Moran name. In this story, he's digging for information about a lottery that appears to be a swindle, when a beautiful informant winds up dead after consuming a poisoned lobster. More murders take place as the story gallops through a night of action. I enjoyed KILLER’S CARESS, and I like this story a lot, too. They could have made a good B-movie series about Johnny Harding starring, say, Jimmy Cagney, although Cagney was too big a star by then. But he’d fit the character perfectly.

Robert A. Garron was really Howard Wandrei, so it’s not surprising that his story “The 15th Pocket” is one of the best-written stories in this issue. A police detective investigates the murder of a wealthy lingerie manufacturer whose body is found in the back seat of an empty cab stalled in traffic. The Spicy Pulps are probably the only place you’d find a character who’s a lingerie tycoon! This isn’t a particularly complicated yarn, but the plot holds together all right and it moves right along with smooth prose. Wandrei’s stories are always good.

With stories by Bellem, Price, Long, and Wandrei, you’d expect this issue of SPICY DETECTIVE STORIES to be a good one, and so it is. I really enjoyed it. Sure, the stories are a little formulaic, but so is most fiction, not just pulp. Space them out a little and they read just fine. If you’ve never read a Spicy Pulp, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Ringmaster of Doom - Brant House (G.T. Fleming-Roberts) (Secret Agent X, November 1935)

When you saw the title RINGMASTER OF DOOM and the by-line Brant House, you probably thought, “Hey, a Secret Agent X novel about the circus!” I know that’s the first thing that went through my mind. Well, as it turns out, this is a Secret Agent X novel, all right, from the November 1935 issue of the pulp magazine of the same name, but there’s no sign of a circus. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good pulp yarn.

This one finds New York City being terrorized by a series of robberies and kidnappings being carried out by brutal, misshapen fiends who look like Neanderthal men. (And speaking of Neanderthals terrorizing modern-day America, I believe there’s a Spider novel by Norvell Page that features the same sort of menace.) Naturally, Secret Agent X has to investigate, and he starts at a fabulous society party being hosted by one of the rich men targeted for kidnapping. While he’s there he has his first violent encounter with one of the beast-men and also runs into a beautiful, redheaded, evil female spy he first crossed swords with during the Great War. From there it’s one breathless adventure after another as the Agent battles the schemes of the mysterious mastermind who calls himself Thoth, after the Egyptian god of the dead, and even wears an ibis-headed mask to make himself look like Thoth.

You know by now whether or not you love this stuff or think it’s just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard of. And you know which camp I fall into. You’ve got your Neanderthals serving as henchmen for a criminal genius. You’ve got said criminal genius lashing his prisoners with an electric whip. You’ve got Secret Agent X escaping death-trap after death-trap by the skin of his teeth. And finally you’ve got a battle royal in a network of abandoned sewers along the East River that’s being flooded. There’s not much time to take a breath in this one, and that’s good, of course, because it is wildly, unabashedly, and wonderfully goofy.

But no circus. That setting was a staple of pulp yarns. I don’t know if any of the Secret Agent X novels takes place in a circus, but it would have been a good setting for the Agent to have an adventure. As it is, RINGMASTER OF DOOM is a lot of fun.

(This post originally appeared on August 6, 2010. Since then, this novel has been reprinted in Volume 5 of SECRET AGENT "X": THE COMPLETE SERIES, published by Altus Press. It's still available in a handsome trade paperback edition from Amazon.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Detective, January 1945

I don't know who did the cover on this issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE, but how can you go wrong with a good-looking, redheaded female cabbie with a skeleton in the back seat? The best-known authors in this issue (which I don't own) are Edward S. Aarons writing under his pseudonym Edward Ronns, C.S. Montanye, and Allan K. Echols, best remembered for his Westerns. Also on hand are Benton Braden (twice, once under his own name and once as Walter Wilson) and Armstrong Livingston, plus house-name John L. Benton.

Review: Crime Nest - Edwin Truett Long (Detective Dime Novels, April 1940)

I’d read a number of pulp stories over the years by Edwin Truett Long, writing under various pseudonyms and house-names, and I always enjoyed them. But I’ve become more interested in him and his work since discovering that he lived for a while on the west side of Fort Worth and is buried on the east side. One of these days, I’m going to drive over to the cemetery and find his grave. But for now, I’m trying to read more of his stories. This time, it’s “Crime Nest”, from the April 1940 issue of DETECTIVE DIME NOVELS, which was published under the transparent pseudonym Edwin Truett. This is the first of three novels featuring Dr. Thaddeus C. Harker, one of the more offbeat characters from the pulp era.

Doc Harker, as he’s often known, is a traveling medicine show huckster, tooling around the country in a bright red coupe and pulling an equally red trailer in which he concocts his cure-all, the world-famous Chickasha Remedy. However, that’s just a cover for his true activities. Doc Harker is actually a brilliant scientific criminologist, and his passion is solving murders and other crimes with the help of two assistants, former wrestler Hercules Jones, who handles the strongarm stuff, and the beautiful Brenda Sloan, whose specialty is infiltrating gangs and gathering intelligence. In “Crime Nest”, our intrepid trio of detectives heads for Abbottsville, a resort town in Texas (although Long never specifies the state) famous for its hot springs. Abbottsville is loosely based on the real town of Mineral Wells.

They’re there in answer to a plea for help from one of Doc’s old friends, who sends Doc a letter explaining that a cabal of criminals from New York and New Jersey have moved in and taken over the town. Doc intends to break their hold on the place and bring them to justice, but the situation gets more complicated when there’s a grisly murder the first night after they arrive.

From there it’s mostly breakneck action with a little detective work thrown in as Long packs in a lot of plot in the span of not much more than 24 hours. More murders, a missing fortune, beautiful women, shootouts, clouts over the head, and lights that go out just as Doc is about to spring a major revelation—we get all that good stuff and more. Long wasn’t a meticulous plotter, but he usually wrestles all those colorful characters and fast-paced action into scenarios that make sense, mostly.

I really enjoyed this yarn and had a grand time reading it. It’s the kind of stuff I grew up on and I still get a kick out of it. One interesting note: the character who sends for Doc Harker is named Arthur Wallace, which just happens to be the name of a pulpster who contributed scores of stories to the Spicy pulps, as did Long. There’s been some mystery as to whether Wallace was a real name or a house-name. Based on Long using the name in this novel, I suspect he was a real guy and that he and Long were friends. That’s only a hunch, though. Maybe somebody will uncover the facts someday.

My friend Tom Johnson was a fan of the Doc Harker series and reprinted all three novels as small-press chapbooks many years ago. I owned all of them but never got around to reading any of them. More recently, Altus Press has reprinted the series in a handsome volume called DR. THADDEUS C. HARKER: THE COMPLETE TALES, with an introduction by none other than Tom Johnson, who provides more biographical information about Long than I’ve found anywhere else. This is where I read “Crime Nest”. The collection is available in paperback and e-book editions, and if you enjoy offbeat pulp detective yarns, I give it a high recommendation.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, February 17, 1934

This is the first appearance of the Park Avenue Hunt Club on the cover of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, with only the second story in the long-running series. And to be honest, in this cover by Lejaren Hiller, an artist I hadn't heard of, the guys look more like villains than the heroes they actually were. Judson Philips, the author of that series and many others, and Edward Parrish Ware are the only authors I recognize in this issue. The others who contributed stories are Herbert O. Yardley, Augustus Muir, and Milo Ray Phelps. The Park Avenue Hunt Club stories have been reprinted in a couple of expensive hardcovers that are no longer available. I'm hoping we'll get some affordable trade paperback and/or e-book editions at some point. The ones I've read are really good.

Review: The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie

I mentioned a while back that Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books are, for me, a surefire cure for an impending reading funk. Well, so are Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, and feeling dissatisfaction with a couple of books I attempted to read, I turned instead to THE MURDER ON THE LINKS, originally published in 1923 as the second book in the Poirot series. It's been reprinted many times, and there are several different e-book and print editions available on Amazon since it's now in public domain.

In this one, Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings are summoned to France by an urgent message from a wealthy English businessman who has a villa near Calais. It seems that the man made his fortune in South America, and now some mysterious threat from his past has cropped up. He mentions Santiago, Chile, but doesn’t go into any details, just asks Poirot to come to France and help him, promising to pay any fee Poirot requests. Poirot and Hastings answer this plea for help, but they’re too late. When they arrive, they find that the man has been murdered, stabbed in the back and left next to an open grave on a golf course that’s under construction next door—hence the title.

Well, not surprisingly, not everything is as it seems. Even though his would-be client is dead, Poirot investigates and along the way clashes with an arrogant French detective. Several beautiful women have to be questioned, including the dead man’s wife, his possible mistress, the possible mistress’s daughter, and a lovely but mysterious theatrical performer Hastings encounters several times. A number of pieces of possible evidence have to be examined, among them a broken watch. We get a disappearing murder weapon that reappears lodged in the chest of a second victim. We get discussions of train schedules. (Cozy mysteries love them some train schedules.) We get our intrepid pair of detectives shuttling back and forth from England to France as the trail leads hither and yon. And then we get the solution to the mystery . . . no, wait, that’s not it, this is the solution . . . no, wait, that’s not right, either. This is the real solution . . . I think.

Some of this might get a little bit tiresome if not for the fact that Christie was such a good writer. The pace crackles right along even when people are just standing around talking. Poirot is a fascinating character, as always, and the dialogue is excellent. Hastings is dense but likable in his role as Watson. I sometimes think Poirot is a little too mean to him, but there’s not much of that in this book.

In the end, I really enjoyed THE MURDER ON THE LINKS. I don’t know how it’s regarded by Christie fans. I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Poirot novels because the plot seems a little more far-fetched and melodramatic than usual, not surprising since it’s only the second book in the series and Christie was probably still figuring out what she was doing. But it’s still a solid yarn and very entertaining. I even figured out a pretty good chunk of the plot as I went along, although I didn’t have the murderer’s identity pinned down. I’ll probably read another one before too much longer.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, May 1941

Of course it's a clown causing trouble on the cover of this issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES. You can't trust those guys! Or maybe he's actually the hero, although I wouldn't bet on that. But you can bet that any cover by Norman Saunders will be dramatic and/or action-packed, and this one certainly is. You've got knives, bullets, and blackjacks! (Hmm, "Knives, Bullets, and Blackjacks!" That wouldn't be a bad title.) Anyway, I don't own this issue, but I'm sure that inside its pages, a reader could find plenty of action. Authors include Emile C. Tepperman (twice, with a Marty Quade story under his own name and a story as by Anthony Clemens), Harold Q. Masur (also twice, once as himself and once as Hal Quincy), G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Cyril Plunkett, Joe Archibald, and several authors unfamiliar to me, James A. Kirch, Arthur T. Harris, Clark Frost, and H.F. Sorensen. I really should have read more from TEN DETECTIVE ACES over the years. It looks like a really good detective pulp.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Twice Murdered - Laurence Donovan

TWICE MURDERED is another in the outstanding series of pulp reprint collections coming out from Black Dog Books. Laurence Donovan is probably best known for the house-name novels he wrote starring Doc Savage, The Phantom Detective, The Skipper, and The Whisperer, but he also had a long and prolific career producing detective and Western yarns for a variety of pulps. This volume collects a dozen stories published in the Thirties and Forties in the pulps PRIVATE DETECTIVE, SPICY DETECTIVE, HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE, BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE, and SUPER DETECTIVE, under Donovan’s name and his pseudonym Larry Dunn.

Donovan had three main strengths as a writer: he was able to come up with complex plots, he used interesting settings, and he wrote fast-moving, effective action scenes. Most of the protagonists in these stories are private eyes, and like Roger Torrey’s private eye characters, they share a lot of similarities despite having different names. I think Donovan’s shamuses come across a little more as individuals, though.

All of the stories included here are good solid pulp tales, consistently entertaining. Some of them are stand-outs, though. “Death Dances on Dimes” is set in a dime-a-dance joint, and it’s unusual in that it has a female narrator. There’s something else about her that’s unusual for the pulps, too, but you’ll have to read the story to find out what it is. “The Man Who Came to Die” is about an insurance racket and manages to be pretty creepy while at the same time packing enough plot and action for a full-length novel into a novelette. “The Greyhound Murders” is another complicated murder mystery with an interesting setting (a dog racing track) and a high body count. “Footprint of Destiny” is about the movie business and features the sort of plot that Dan Turner is usually untangling. I guess Dan was out of town that week.

In addition to the stories, editor/publisher Tom Roberts provides a fine introduction that includes more biographical information about Donovan than I’ve seen anywhere else, as well as an extensive bibliography of Donovan’s work. TWICE MURDERED is an excellent addition to the Black Dog Books line, and if you’re a pulp fan, I highly recommend it.

(This post originally appeared on June 14, 2010. And even though more than 15 years have passed since then, TWICE MURDERED is still available in both e-book and paperback editions, and my high recommendation of it stands.)