We live in an amazing time when a lot of pulp stories are being reprinted. Reprints from Altus Press (wide range of pulpy stuff), Black Dog Books (focuses on adventure pulps) and Haffner Press (concentrates on science fiction and fantasy, with some detective stuff as well), to mention a few, are doing an amazing job of selecting the best pulp stories and reprinting them.
For detective and mystery lovers, there is a lot to look forward to this fall. Altus Press has an amazing line of reprints from Black Mask and Dime Detective lined up.
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Robert Sampson in Yesterday’s Faces – The Solvers:
The MacBride-Kennedy stories were one of Nebel’s major contributions to the magazine. Not as poetic as Chandler, not as realistically detailed as Hammett, the series is an extended masterpiece of hardboiled fiction, violence wrapped around a core of pity. MacBride and his wayward cops are unlike any police you meet in more gritty police procedurals. But in spite of their imperfect professional techniques, they come alive. They move through that terrible world you sometimes sense behind the headlines, that fouled place where graft, corruption, and murder are customary.
A comprehensive introduction to the series can be found at the Black Mask Magazine site.
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James Reasoner on Vee Brown:
Brown is one of the first playboy/detectives, but unlike Bruce Wayne or Richard Curtis Van Loan, his activities as a cop are known to all while the source of his considerable wealth is a secret. This leads a newspaper reporter to investigate him, and the reporter is the narrator of the story, not Brown, which makes for a considerable difference from Daly’s yarns about Race Williams. The prose is more restrained, though it can get get pretty lurid in the action scenes. And Vee Brown is an interesting character, small and unathletic, but deadly with a gun and willing to meet the criminals on their own ground and deal out his own brand of justice. Cultured, well-educated, and wryly humorous even as he’s gunning down the villains, it’s almost like Niles Crane became the Spider instead of Richard Wentworth.
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CASS BLUE’s a New York private dick who appeared in several short stories in Dime Detective back in the thirties. With his hard-ass attitude, a conveniently flexible set of morals and a blackjack on his hip, he’s ready for just about anything. His pals include speakeasy owner Al Lascoine, who serves up booze and alibis.
The stories are all rendered in pulpster Lawrence’s trademark first person, over-boiled prose style, full of gunfights and plot holes. Lawrence may not have been much of a writer, but he sure knew how to slap together the usual suspects to make a slam-bang action story.
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Lawrence is probably best known for his tales of The Broadway Squad, the most ruthless, vicious gang of thugs to ever pin on badges in the pulps.
Marty Marquis was an amoral detective in charge of a squad of thieves, extortionists and murderers, who were cops.
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Walker Martin on Mr. Maddox (courtesy Mysteryfile):
Flynn’s major detective effort was the long running Mr Maddox series in Dime Detective. Between 1938 and running into 1950 he appeared at least 35 times, all of them long novelets, some close to 20,000 words. Each story was a mystery/detective tale starring Joe Maddox, a racetrack bookie who along with his sidekick, Oscar, was always involved in complex murder cases. His nemesis was a cop named Cassidy.
Now frankly, when I first started reading these stories in 1969 and 1970, I did not particularly like them at all. They were ok but definitely not favorites of mine. However, as I continued collecting Dime Detective and completing my set(274 issues), I realized that this was the longest running series by far and must of been very popular with the readers. So I kept giving him a chance and reading others in the series and you can guess what happened. I began to love the character and the stories.
Give Mr Maddox a try and you too might become a fan of “The Bland Buddha Of the Bangtail Circuit”.
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Ron Goulart on the Rambler in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine:
Murphy shared his creator’s peripatetic inclinations. In the dozen and a half Rambler yarns he crisscrossed the country, working as a reporter on big metropolitan tabloids and small-town sheets. He generated front-page stories that unmasked gambling kingpins, cunning kidnappers, tommyguntoting hoodlums and once a “night-shirted order that [combined] the worst features of the Ku Klux and the Black Legion.” In all of the Rambler adventures certain things were certain. Murphy would always get a job on a newspaper, he would meet an attractive and bright young woman, he would crack a baffling case, and then, no matter how tempted to stay, would resume his rambles.
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Can anyone help here? I couldn’t find anything online.
Edit: From a comment by Walker Martin below:
The Keyhole Kerry series lasted for 8 novelets during 1937-1939. He was a sort of Walter Winchell type reporter that had his own radio show and was constantly getting involved in murder cases. Another interesting series character from Fred Davis who was cranking out unusual detective series characters for editor Ken White at DIME DETECTIVE during the mid-thirties through the 1940’s period. |
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Hugh B. Cave:
Tough, cantankerous Inspector Allhoff, who lost his legs in a shoot-out with crooks armed with a machine-gun, lives across the street from Police Headquarters in a slum tenement building and solves intricate mysteries while guzzling endless cups of coffee. Allhoff is one of the characters who graced the lively pages of Dime Detective Magazine in the heyday of that magazine’s highly successful career. These Inspector Allhoff stories are great detective mystery yarns, mostly developed via lively dialogue between Allhoff and his colleagues, and told in the first person by one of the colleagues.
And from myself: I have enjoyed all the stories of Inspector Allhoff I’ve read so far in the collection, Footprints on the Brain. |
The Keyhole Kerry series lasted for 8 novelets during 1937-1939. He was a sort of Walter Winchell type reporter that had his own radio show and was constantly getting involved in murder cases. Another interesting series character from Fred Davis who was cranking out unusual detective series characters for editor Ken White at DIME DETECTIVE during the mid-thirties through the 1940's period.
By the way, there is a 7th volume but the series character is so crazy and insane that some reviewers are refusing to list the collection. Yes, I'm talking about Inspector Allhoff by D.L. Champion. If the producers had tried to base the TV series, IRONSIDES on Inspector Allhoff, the censors would have demanded that the show be cancelled. It was just too controversial for network TV.
Walker, thanks for the dope on Keyhole Kerry. Sounds interesting.
I didn't leave out Inspector Allhoff on purpose, that was a mistake. I liked him a lot in the stories I've read, the ones that were collected in Footprints on the Brain. Added that one back to the list.
Sorry Sai, I was just kidding about reviewers refusing to list the Allhoff book. But he sure was a crazy character! I hope that someday we see the other main series by D.L. Champion that appeared in BLACK MASK. Rex Sackler, the penny pinching private eye was another very strange character.