Bold Venture Press is back with another new issue of Pulp Adventures, #28 for Winter 2018.
We get not just another Norman Saunders cover, but a previously never published cover! With it we also get to see some of the preliminary sketches he did and what the original plans for it were.
As always, a mix of old and new pulp in a wide range of genres: mystery, western, horror, adventure, pulp hero and more. We even get two stories from the same author, but they were published under two different pseudonyms in the same pulp magazine!
From classic pulp we get the following:
• “Murder, Maestro, Please!” by Charles Boeckman, which I thought fit well with the cover artwork. It appeared in Famous Detective Stories in the ’50s (though this isn’t noted in the issue). It focuses on sad lovers trying to improve their lives, and is more psychological than the usual fast-action pulp story. Bold Venture has put out some collections of Boeckman’s works, along with an autobiography.
• “Killer Wanted — First Class” by Geoffrey North comes from Private Detective Stories. Here a PI is on the trail of the killer of a sheriff, at the request of the sheriff’s nephew.
• “The Word Wranglers” by Stephen Payne comes from the March 1949 issue of West. Both these pulp reprints include the original illustrations.
• David Wright O’Brien, like many pulp authors, wrote tales under his own name and several other names, such as John York Cabot and Duncan Farnsworth (this as an homage to his uncle, Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales), as well as collaborating with other writers. He wrote over a hundred stories, most in the fantasy/sf field, but his career (and life) was cut short when he was killed in action in WWII. For this we get an article about him by Audrey Parente. Then we get a humorous essay on himself from the March 1942 issue of Amazing Stories, and two stories under two different pseudonyms he used: “The Fantastic Twins” by Cabot and “Afraid to Live” by Duncan Farnsworth. Both have the original interior artwork by the same artist. “Fantastic Twins” is a humorous tale of an ad-copy writer given a special gift. “Afraid to Live” is more serious, about a report trying to save potential suicides.
For new fiction we get:
• “My Stripper Past” by Michael Bracken is an interesting first-person story of, well, a former stripper.
• Two stories: “The Doom That Came to Al Capone” by David Bernard and “Benny the Beezer” by John E. Petty are more or less in the style of H.P. Lovecraft.
• “Janeck’s Death” by Dan McCarthy is a bit of a crime tale.
• “Woolworth’s … For All Your Defensive Needs” by C.J. Henderson, which is one of his PI Jack Hagee stories. Bold Venture has put out four volumes of stories with this character.
• “Monkey Men” by Johnny Strike is an interesting little story, to say more will give too much away.
As always, a great collection of stories. If I had any complaint it is that in this issue the sources for the reprinted stories aren’t told in the issue itself. I hope that was just an oversight. The next issue should be out in a couple of months as they’ve done a good job of being pretty consistent on getting this out. I look forward to it.
