CARL JACOBI “Crocodile.” Short story. First published in Complete Stories, 30 April 1934. Collected in East of Samarinda, edited by Carl Jacobi & R. Dixon Smith (Bowling Green University Popular Press, softcover, 1989).

   If Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) is remembered as a writer today, it is by collectors of such long ago pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Thrilling Mystery, Marvel Tales, Planet Stories and the like. He was, however, an equal hand with adventure stories that appeared in titles such as Top Notch, Short Stories, and Complete Stories, which is where this lead-off story in the collection East of Samarinda first appeared.

   I haven’t read all of the stories in that modest compendium yet, more than twenty of them, but the ones I’ve read or browsed though take place in Dutch Borneo, which in the 1930s was as much an out of the world place for adventurers tohave adventures as there ever could be. The jungles teeming with snakes, the native Dyaks, not all friendly, the rivers filled with crocodiles, all grist for Jacobi’s mill.

   But was he ever there? In a word, no. He may have never taken a step outside his native Minnesota. So how did he get the details to sound so right? In another word, research. Libraries existed before Google came along, and as a matter of fact they still do.

   In “Crocodile,” a collector of animals for zoos and the like, comes staggering into the camp of a surveyor for the Dutch named McNair, and once fortified with enough whiskey, the former tells the latter of how he killed his partner who’d come across a priceless emerald by tricking him into falling into a river swarming with crocodiles.

   Sometimes fate needs a helping hand, and that’s exactly what happens here.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “The Heavenly Rat.” Novella. Ed Jenkins (a/k/a the Phantom Crook). First published in Black Mask, September 1934. Not known to have been collected or reprinted.

   After Perry Mason and Donald Lam and Bertha Cool, the most popular of his creations, and certainly of his many pulp characters, was criminal Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook who haunted the pages of the legendary Black Mask.

   Jenkins is a professional crook always in the shadows, often in disguise, and often hiding among his friends, allies, and sometimes rivals in the shadows of Chinatown. Gardner, who had begun his career as a young lawyer in Chinatown representing clients there, had a genuine interest and respect for the people, and if there is the faintest taint of condescension and prejudice still found in stories like this one they were, for their time, fairly rare in their representation in the pulps of the Chinese as human beings and not the Yellow Peril, as allies and not implacable cruelty personified.

   In “The Heavenly Rat” Jenkins, in disguise as a down-on-his-luck bum looking for work, is stopped by a man who flashes a badge and tell him if he wants work to meet him that night at the “Yellow Lotus.” Once the man is gone, Jenkins really has no reason to show up, but there is something about the fellow, he’s no ordinary cop for one thing, that leads Ed to follow through.

   Granted that might seem a pretty odd thing for a wanted man to do, but then Jenkins is a somewhat more grounded and less romantic version of the Saint in many stories. He just can’t not show up especially when he is tipped to “a twist in a blue coupe” tagging him after the man with the gold badge approached him.

   The girl is Beatrice Harris, the daughter of miner George Harris, accused of murdering his ex partner Frank Trasker after a strike. Also partners in the game were an ex pug named Sam Reece, and a Chinese cook. The big shot behind them, the man who flashed a badge and hired Jenkins, is Oscar Milen, and he knows who killed Trasker, that’s why Harris daughter is following Ed hoping if she does Milen’s bidding he will clear her father.

   The game ups considerably when Jenkins witnesses Sam Reece killed by a big one legged Chinese on a crutch with a throwing knife in the fog. As Reece dies he lets two words escape his lips, T’sien Sheuh, “the Rat of Heaven” aka “the Bat.”

   The story has pretty much everything, a good girl in with bad men trying to clear her Father, if indeed he is innocent, a smart dangerous criminal the police can’t or won’t touch, a hero with no one to call on for help caught between protecting his neck and helping a girl he can’t trust, and a mysterious Chinese exacting revenge in the San Francisco fog.

   And Gardner rings every change out of those old familiar bells, never letting his hero or his readers pause, spinning expertly from one moment to the next, the writing not as artful as Hammett, Chandler, or Whitfield, but never less than perfectly expressed.

   Hammett would have said it cleaner and sharper, Chandler more eloquently, but Gardner nails it without fuss or bother. There is something to be said for cool professionalism.

   Tongs, revenge, a big dope deal, a beautiful girl, Jenkins framed for Sam Reece death, it all piles on in a novella that moves in a clip down to a satisfying conclusion of that favorite Gardner plot, the Cinderella story, with Jenkins on his own again as he always is.

   Maybe the music is a little tinny, the tune a bit too familiar. Like the ever present fog a familiar slightly musty air lays over it all, but it is still music, still sweet, still beautiful in it’s oft repeated rhythms if you know how to listen, and are inclined to its song.

DASHIELL HAMMETT “Corkscrew.” The Continental Op #20. Short novel. First published in The Black Mask, September 1925. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1947 (severely edited by Fred Dannay). Collected in The Big Knockover, edited by Lillian Hellman (Random House, hardcover, 1966) which includes all of Dannay’s changes and adds one. Also collected in The Big Book of the Continental Op (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, softcover, 2017), which goes back to the original text and reverses all the changes.

   In many ways “Corkscrew” is one of my favorites of Hammett’s shorter works. In it the Op travels to an isolated small town in Arizona (circa 1925, I presume) and tries his best to fit in as an obvious city slicker in one of the last pockets of the Old West, complete with all of the lawless elements you can think of, standard cliches all, including some of the newer ones, such as opium users and human trafficking of would-be immigrants across the border.

   Nor did the Old West have automobiles (flivvers) or telephones, although while I’m sure they are mentioned, I don’t think anyone in Corkscrew had one. The Op’s mission is supposed to be a secret: he’s undercover as the new deputy sheriff in town, but he’s recognized as that eve before he arrives. He’s been sent by the head office to clean up all of the bad element so that their clients can come safely in and bring commercial enterprise to the area.

   The scene that I like best – and it’s stuck with me ever since I read this story the first time – is the one in which the Op is joshed along by some ranchhands who persuade him that the horse they’re offering to sell him is as gentle a horse as there ever could be. Ha! Three times on, and three times off. The Op is no horseman, but it is a way to get the locals’ respect.

   What I also noticed this time around is how much of precursor to Red Harvest this tale is. The Op comes in and when the opportunity arises, he sets one faction of the non-savory aspect of Corkscrew against the other. What I also noticed is this is more than just a crime story. It’s a detective tale as well, and well-clued at that. And I didn’t even notice!

   Here’s a link to the long list of changes Fred Dannay made when he published the story in EQMM, as carefully delineated by Terry Zobeck on Don Herron’s website.

   Some are relatively minor, some consist of huge chunks of expository text. And some are explainable, sort of. A character referred to as the “the Jew” in the original version becomes “The Toad” in EQMM. It’s not a choice I would have made, but as I said, it sort of makes sense.

T. T. FLYNN “The Deadly Orchid.” Trixie Meehan & Mike Harris #1. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, April 15, 1933. Reprinted in The Pulps, edited by Tony Goldstone (Chelsea House, hardcover, 1970) and Hard-Boiled Dames, edited by Bernard Drew (St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1986).

   I have written about the bickering pair of PI’s by the name of Trixie Meehan and Mike Harris before. You can find my review of “Barred Doors,” the seventh in the series, here. To recap quickly, though, they both work for the Blaine Agency and are always casting barbs at each other – in a friendly way, you know —  or at least I think so.

   In this, their first appearance, they go undercover in a plush hotel disguised as husband and wife (but in a suite of adjoining rooms, with a lock on the door between them). With the benefit of an unlimited expense account, they also are pretending to be a fabulously wealthy pair of Texans (oil money), and living it up greatly.

   Their target: a incredulously beautiful wisp of a girl, nicknamed the Orchid, who is also a notorious blackmailer who has also been known to kill her victims when things don’t work out perfectly with one of her schemes.

   Mike is the one who tells the story and the one who works up the plan to discover where the love letters she is holding over her latest victim are located, but Trixie is no slouch either when she is needed to take part in the action.

   There’s not a lot of depth to the tale, but it’s smoothly told, in something of a screwball story sort of way. Somebody really ought to put together a complete collection of their adventures together.
   

      The Mike Harris & Trixie Meehan stories –

The Deadly Orchid (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Apr 15 1933
Falling Death (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 28 1933
Murder’s Masquerade (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Mar 31 1934
The Yin Shee Dragon (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 29 1934
Murder Harbor (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 1 1934
The City Hall Murders (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Mar 23 1935
Barred Doors (na) Detective Fiction Weekly May 18 1935
Nitro! Nitro! (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Apr 4 1936
The Letters and the Law (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Jun 27 1936
Abbey of the Damned (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 30 1937
Murder Circus (na) Detective Fiction Weekly May 21 1938
The Secret of the Swamp (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Feb 25 1939
Brother Murder (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 2 1939
Mike Finds Trouble (sl) Detective Fiction Weekly Aug 17 1940, etc.
Build Up for Murder (nv) Detective Fiction Aug 20 1941
Killer in the Clouds (ss) Detective Tales Mar 1951

  ROBERT R. MILL “Murder on the Island.” Short story. “Tiny” David #1. [Corrected to #2. See Comment #1.] First published in Blue Book, May 1933. Collected in Murder on the Island and Other Stories of “Tiny” David and the Black Horse Troop (Black Dog Books, paperback, 2004).

   We don’t get to see any of the Black Horse Troop in this, the first story of 47 in all, all appearing in Blue Book magazine between 1933 and 1942. The Black Dog collection contains only four of them. The rest I imagine I’ll never get a chance to read, never having collected the magazine, and the ones I did own for a while are long gone.

   In this one, we meet only Trooper Edward David and his immediate superior, Sergeant James Crosby. The setting is somewhere in the Adirondacks in New York State, as Tiny and the sergeant are rowing to an isolated island where a wealthy man and his daughter are living, along with several servants. Disliking publicity, visitors are generally not welcome, but an urgent telephone call from Joseph Bahn has them heading that way in rowboat, and in a hurry.

   Once there they find the body of the Bahns’ butler, dead, having been shot in the head. Although six foot two and weighing 220 pounds, “Tiny” David may appear lazy and slow-witted, but he’s one observant fellow, a lot sharper than his sergeant, and when he senses that something is wrong with the scenario they’ve been presented with, you can count on his sense been exactly right.

   What this story turns out to be is a perfectly ordinary detective mystery, a rather light-hearted approach that even without a challenge to the reader, an equally observant reader can see and interpret the same clues that Tiny does.

   For more on the author and the series, here’s a link to Sai Shankar’s Pulpflakes blog and his essay on both:

https://pulpflakes.blogspot.com/2017/01/robert-r-mill.html

JAMES A. LAWSON “Hard Guy.” Short story. “Hard Guy” Dallas Duane #1. First published in Spicy Western Stories, March 1937. Collected in Dying Comes Hard (Black Dog Books, softcover, 2015) under the author’s real name, James P. Olsen. Introduction by James Reasoner.

   â€œHard Guy” Dallas Duane was an oil range troubleshooter in the 1930s, a fact that fully qualifies him as a PI. His adventures took him all over Oklahoma and Texas, often working undercover. And under the covers, too, which you will have already recognized for yourself if you saw that this first one was published in Spicy Western, a pulp magazine which took its title very very seriously.

   This first of 20 adventures has Hard Guy tracking down the killer of the local county attorney, all the while beating himself up for being tricked into being in the arms of very friendly saloon singer by the name of Nancy. Then follows ten pages of non-stop action, punctuated by the stops to wonder over the pulchritudinous delights of both Nancy and another girl named Kate, both of whom look very good, even with their clothes off, and even while less frequently with them on.

   Great literature this is not, as a wise man once told me, but if that wise man never read this story, I’m one up on him. I just did! And note this: the Black Dog collection collects all twenty of Hard Guy’s recorded adventures.

DAY KEENE – Dead Man’s Tide. Stark House Crime Classic, softcover, January 2021. Three-in-one volume with The Dangling Carrot and The Big Kiss-Off. First published as by Williams Richards (Graphic #60, paperback original, 1953). Expanded and revised from “Wait for the Dead Man’s Tide,” by Day Keene, published in the August 1949 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine. Also published as It’s a Sin to Kill, as by Day Keene (Avon T-814, paperback, 1958).

   After a short prologue consisting of following a woman’s nude body as it floats along with the tide in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast, Dead Man’s Tide starts with a bang and never lets up until 120 pages later (in the soon-to-be-released Stark House edition). It opens for real with Charlie Ames, a fishing excursion boat captain waking up alone in a strange bed, on another boat with a woman’s clothing scattered about, a liquor bottle rolling back and forth on the floor, and $5000 in his pants pocket.

   Whose boat, whose clothes, and most importantly, whose $5000? And where is she? No one knows, including the police, who most definitely do not believe Charlie’s story of having a cup of coffee with a prospective client on his own boat, but everything going black and he not knowing what happened until he woke up the following morning.

   What’s worse is that he doesn’t think that his wife Mary Lou, a singer and hostess at a local night club, believes his story, either. That’s what pains him the worst. But when the woman’s nude body is finally found (see above), it’s the local police force who he finally realizes really is his greater concern.

   Fellow blogger Cullen Gallagher, who wrote the introduction to the Stark House Press edition, calls this a “man on the run” novel, a trademark theme of author Day Keene, and it’s a good one. There are lots of twists and turns in store for Charlie Ames in this one. Every time he thinks he’s reached a point of safety, fate extends him another finger. Eventually, in a final move of sheer desperation, he decides to take his destiny into his own hands, until at last comes the biggest twist of them all.

   Highly recommended.

   This has been a terrible year for conventions. SF conventions, Windy City, and Pulpfest, all cancelled and postponed to next year. For 50 years I’ve had my choice of shows to attend, usually going to Pulpcon/Pulpfest and Windy City. But for the first time I had no convention to attend until Pulp Adventurecon on November 7, 2020. A couple months ago I would have said that there was no way the show could be held because of the NJ lockdown mandated by Gov. Murphy.

Left to right: Walker Martin, Matt Moring, Scott Hartshorn,
and William Maynard seated.

   But somehow, against all odds, Rich Harvey and Audrey Parente managed to organize a show despite the virus increasing in NJ. Social distancing was the rule with masks and hand sanitizer available. The venue was new with the location moved to Mt Laurel, NJ at the Clarion Hotel. I don’t believe we will be returning to the Bordentown location.

   The dealer’s room was very large with 16 dealers and around 30 tables. The pandemic kept attendance down but there were 60 to 80 attendees. However, as you can see from the photo of the room, often the room appeared almost empty. Here are my snapshot impressions:

   Author and dealer Darrell Schweitzer had his usual table but did not appear to sell much.

   Matt Moring and I shared a table but between us we sold only four pulps. However we came to buy, not to sell.

   Gary Lovisi and his wife were present with the new Paperback Parade issue. Gary also filmed a report on You Tube.

   John Gunnison had six tables and appeared to be selling well.

   Ed Hulse said this show was better that the last two Pulp Adventurecons combined. At least for him.

Ed Hulse.

   Paul Herman had a table full of paperbacks and did well.

   William Maynard sold many books that he heavily discounted.

   Martin Grams shocked me with his “Going out of business” sale. For many years he has been selling DVDs and writing books about the old TV series. But he soon will be opening a Coffee shop and his last book will be the one on the Lone Ranger.

   Digges La Touche usually stays all day buying pulps but this year he was in and out before I even arrived. The virus has changed our buying habits.

   What did I buy? William Maynard sold me a set of the Sanders of the Rivers stories by Edgar Wallace. Ed Hulse sold me a couple nice looking books on L. Ron Hubbard, and John Gunnison sold me three pulps that I had once owned. It seems that I had traded off these issues but as I often do years later, I start collecting them again.

Dealers room.

   The big buy for me was the silver anniversary issue of Top Notch, March 1935. I had mistakenly sold it 20 years ago and it took me all this time to find another copy. I also bought a copy of the May 1939 issue of Dime Detective which I used to own. It has a great titled story by Cornell Woolrich, “The Case of the Killer-Diller.” I also use to own the Dime Mystery issue for October 1947. If you collect Black Mask and Dime Detective, you should also collect the other Popular Publication detective titles such as Dime Mystery, Detective Tales, New Detective. I’ve been in the pulp collecting game so long that I’ve started to collect titles for the second time around.

John Gunnison, on the right.

   For several years I’ve been hosting a brunch get together for my long time friends on the Friday before the show. This year, after much thought, I decided to go ahead and have a scaled down version of the lunch. There were six of my closest pals in attendance:

   Matt Moring–In addition to being in charge of Steeger Books and Altus Press, he also collects pulps and original art

   Paul Herman–Dealer, art collector, and Black Mask collector.

   Nick Certo–Book dealer and art collector.

   Scott Hartshorn–collector of all sorts of bizarre things and art collector also.

   Ed Hulse–Now for a couple friends who are not art collectors. Ed is editor and publisher of Blood n Thunder magazine and Murania Press books..

   Digges La Touche–Book, pulp, and dime novel collector. Not too many dime novel guys around anymore. He also is the last of the pulp excerpters. I remember when there were a lot of old time collectors excerpting pulps and making home made books of the excerpted stories.

C. M. Eddy material (Weird Tales author and friend of Lovecraft).

   I just added up the years I’ve known these guys. Over 200 years between them! Some good deals were made at the pre-convention brunch also. Matt sold a three volume Steeger Books edition of H. Bedford Jones complete John Solomon series. A set of preliminary Larry Schwinger drawings for his Cornell Woolrich paperback covers were sold. Several issues of Western Story were bought. After the brunch we found a new place to eat dinner near my house. PJ’s Pancake House and Tavern. Once again I noticed that I’m often the only drinker. This must mean something but I haven’t figured out what. Maybe a Nero Wolfe connection? Or tough private eyes?

   We stayed at the convention until almost 4 pm and then went to Mastoris Diner, another post-convention tradition. Good friends, good food, good drink, as my old friend Harry Noble used to say.

   So thank you Rich and Audrey for taking the big risk and putting on the convention. Hope to see you next year without the pandemic! Also thanks to Paul Herman for taking these photos.

   I hope to see many of you at Windy City in April and Pulpfest in August next year. I don’t know if I can survive another such year as 2020.

FRANCIS L. & ROBERTA FUGATE – Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer. Morrow, hardcover, 1980.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. Morrow, hardcover, 1981.

   Erle Stanley Gardner often proudly referred to himself as a fiction factory. The total sales of all the books he ever wrote, in all languages and in all editions, is currently estimated at well over 300 million copies. His isolated ranch near Temecula, California, grew to include twenty-two buildings, designed to house himself, his secretarial staff, and his voluminous, all-inclusive archives.

   All of his earliest writing was done for the “woodpulp” magazines, those ephemeral pieces of popular culture disdained at the time by librarians and the literary establishment alike. The covers were lurid and garish; the contents were written to match. If you were to find an attic filled with them today, you would have a small fortune on your hands.

   By 1933, Erle Stanley Gardner was a household word. Series characters such as Lester Leith, Speed Dash, Ed Jenkins, Senor Lobo, Sidney Zoom, and scores of others were the lifeblood of a list of pulp magazines a page long. In that year alone, Gardner had a total of seventy short stories, novelettes, and articles see print.

   It was also the year that Perry Mason came along. Morrow published The Case of the Velvet Claws in March of that year, and The Case of the Sulky Girl followed in quick order. In 1934 Gardner’s production of short pieces fell off a bit, to something just under forty or so, but to compensate there were three more Mason novels.

   Perry Mason immediately captured the nation’s attention. Originally conceived as a hard-boiled attorney named Ed Stark, straight from the pages of Black Mask magazine, which also gave Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler good running starts on their careers, Mason went on to be the star performer in a total of eighty-five novels.

   They were formula stuff, but Gardner. knew exactly what his readers wanted. Each of the cases culminated in a courtroom scene, with a trial and the future of Mason s client hanging in the balance. Gardner’s own background as a practicing attorney helped provide for some of the trickiest shenanigans ever devised, most of it well beyond the reach, one imagines, of even such superstars of the profession as F. Lee Bailey and Louis Nizer, to name two.

   There were also comic strips, a radio show, and, of course, the long-running Raymond Burr television vehicle, and all had Gardner as the guiding hand.

   Details of Gardner at work – since he was paid by the word for his work for the pulps, he had a gadget on his typewriter that counted off another tally every time he hit the space bar; of his struggle to change his style sufficiently to get the first book published; of his characters (the real reason Della Street never married Perry Mason, for example); and his philosophy of writing (begin with a mystery and tell a story that people want to read) – are all to be found in the Fugate book, published late last year.

   It is based primarily on Gardner’s papers, transferred en masse to the University of Texas upon his death in 1970. In this wealth of material lies a fabulous practical how-to-do-it manual for prospective writers. Gardner’s style was functional, to say the most. In his mysteries he emphasized plot above all, which places him slightly out of step in today’s world, but as of 1979 it is reported that he was still averaging 2,400 sales a day, every day of the year.

   That Gardner also wrote science fiction will probably come as a surprise to many, but in The Human Zero, Gardner’s entire output of fantastic stories is reprinted, all of it from Argosy magazine between 1928 and 1932.

   As science fiction, from today’s perspective, the science in these tales is shaky and the fiction is worse. These seven stories are filled with mad scientists, strange inventions, catastrophic calamities, and bizarre theories of evolution. But in those days between the World Wars, this was the nature of the field, and what Gardner wrote was no worse than any of the rest of it.

   Still, science fiction was obviously not his forte, and he was probably glad to leave it. Perry Mason was his ticket to success, not imaginary flights to Venus in backyard anti-gravity machines.

   In essence, what Greenberg and Waugh give us here in the first of a series planned to resurrect much of Gardner’s work from the “woodpulp” pile, are the skeletons of Gardner’s past. Upcoming books may be better. The stories in The Human Zero were probably better left buried.

HENRY KUTTNER “Don’t Look Now.” First published in Startling Stories, March 1948. Reprinted many times, including: My Best Science Fiction Story, edited by Oscar J. Friend & Leo Margulies (Merlin Press, hardcover, 1949); The Great Science Fiction Stories: Volume 10, 1948, edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, paperback, 1983); and Tales from the Spaceport Bar, edited by George H. Scithers & Darrell Schweitzer (Avon, paperback, 1987). Collected in Two-Handed Engine by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (Centipede Press, hardcover, 2005).

   Mos Eisley and the spaceport bar. What a perfect scene. One that thousands of long time science fiction fans had read about and pictured in their minds for years. And there it was, having come to life right before their eyes.

   Bars where spacefarers come to talk, lie and swap yarns. Not all of them human. All kinds and shapes of aliens used Mos Eisley as a stopover point, a place to restock and refuel and catch up on the news. Or in some cases the bar is on Earth, and the conversation is between two men, and the Martians are the beings secretly ruling the world that one of the men is trying to convince the other he can see. Most of the time they are invisible, lurking just out the corner of your eye, but when you can see them, they are easily identified by their third eye. Right in the middle of their foreheads.

   This is a classic story, first published way back in 1948, and if you go looking, over 70 years later, I’m sure you can find a book in print that it’s in, or if not, then in ebook format. In those years after the war, there was a certain uncertainty, if not outright paranoia, about the possibility we were not alone in the universe, that mankind had lost control of things, and in “Don’t Look Now,” Kuttner, in his most humorous mode, capitalizes on it most excellently.