INTRO. These are the third and fourth stories in the February 1936 issue of Dime Detective that I covered in it entirety in my column “Speaking of Pulp” in the April/May/June, 1979 issue of The Not So Private Eye.
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   The next couple of shorts can be disposed of rather quickly. “Postlude to Murder” by Donald S. Aitken features a private eye named Barker on the trail of a missing nephew who doesn’t know he’s suffering from hydrophobia. Once located, he’s immediately kidnapped. Somehow the story’s just too short for all these bizarre happenings to begin to become convincing.

   Next up, Robert Sidney Bowen is a pulp author probably more famous for his flying stories. He did all the science-fictional Dusty Ayres (and his Battle Birds) air war novels, for example, but he also did a couple of hardcover private eye novels in the late 1940s.

   In “The Flying Coffin” his hero is Kip Lacey, ace trouble-shooter for Central Airways, a nice combination of both writing worlds. A strange case; once again, not surprisingly, the emphasis is on the bizarre. A corpse traveling incognito as air cargo is kidnapped, then turns up later as the victim of a hit-and-run accident. There are some noticeable loose ends in the final wrap-up, but only because Lacey’s loyalty is to the airline, and not to the cops.