Thu 28 Sep 2023
Pulp Stories I’ve Read: T. T. FLYNN “Bride of the Beast.”
Posted by Steve under Magazines , Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[4] Comments
INTRO. This is the fifth and final story in the February 1936 issue of Dime Detective that I covered in its 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 cover illustration is taken from the final story, a long novelette by T. T. Flynn entitled “Bride of the Beast,” which sounds more like a horror story from Dime Mystery than it docs a detective story. Flynn was an extremely prolific detective story writer from the pulps. He’s never seemed to have gathered much attention, but his stories are always filled with action, and more, they seem to know where they’re going.
In this one, a circus is about to go bankrupt — strange things are happening on the midway! Trouble-shooter Steve Waring is sent out by the bank to find out what’s going on, and on his first night on the job an elephant rider in the opening procession is decapitated, almost in full view of the horrified audience.
The circus atmosphere is excellent, the menace is effectively scary, and no holds are barred in producing sudden and violent death. It ends with a furious train ride through the night and with the nightmarish capture of a crazy killer about to torture Joan Wells, tied and helpless, running the circus in her father’s absence, with a twisted replica of love. Hence the title. I guess it sounds like corn, but it’s still the best story in the magazine.
As you’ll have already gathered, if you’ve been paying attention, the emphasis [in the stories in this issue of this magazine] has not been on ordinary detective work, This had probably been even more true in earliest days of Dime Detective, which was first published in the early 1930s but the trend away from grotesque mystery had not yet eliminated it from the magazine by 1936, as we’ve just seen. Many people tell me they prefer the 1940s version of DD, when the accent changed slightly from the incredibly fantastic to the merely screwy.
Give me a hand, will you? Help me clean up these little shreds of brown paper that are all over the floor here …
September 28th, 2023 at 9:35 pm
Flynn is one of my favorite Western writers, but I’ve only discovered in the last few years how prolific he was in the detective pulps, too. Excellent writer all the way around.
September 29th, 2023 at 1:10 am
In terms of pulps, I think Flynn may have written more detective stories than he did westerns, but he wrote so many stories, it would take a long time to sit down and sort them all out. He was a interesting fellow. There’s a lot of information about him here on Sai Shankar’s Pulp Flakes blog:
https://pulpflakes.blogspot.com/2014/01/tt-flynn-sailor-railroadman-author.html
September 29th, 2023 at 8:45 pm
I can’t help but wonder if Flynn’s reputation would be greater if he had published a few novels in the genre and not just magazine fiction. He certainly had the skills to have expanded, but then novels didn’t really pay that well unless you got them serialized in the slicks, and I guess paycheck to paycheck short fiction probably was the saner choice for a pro.
Still Flynn the hardboiled writer might have been a breakthrough with the right book at the right time.
September 30th, 2023 at 1:27 pm
Flynn never did write a crime or mystery novel for a major, well known publisher. When the pulps died, he never made the transition to paperback writing, as so many of his contemporaries did.
Here’s his entry in Hubin, a very meager one, I’m afraid:
FLYNN, T(homas) T(heodore, Jr.) (1902-1978)
[] *It’s Murder! (Hector Kelly, 1950, pb)
[] *Murder Caravan (Hector Kelly, 1950, pb)
I have no idea who Hector Kelly was.