Mike Blair story by Hank Searls?

 

Can anyone identify this story? This is most probably a Mike Blair story by Hank Searls, but I can't be 100% certain, because the story was published in Finnish without the author's name. Mike Blair is in it, though, and it sure feels like a hardboiled PI story from the late fourties or early fifties.

In the story, Blair runs into an old flame, who sings in a nightclub performing under a false name. The woman tells Blair that she's anxious to see another man, who snatched her from Blair five years ago and is getting out of prison. Blair promises to look for the man. He also gets entangled with a gangster boss who may have set the man up as the murderer of a man who won some money from him in a casino. In one scene, Blair and a bartender who's helping him get almost drowned in a car. It's a good story of its kind, full of action, beautiful women and dangerous fist fights. It almost never sloops down. 

Any help would be appreciated. The Blair stories were collected and published by Steeger Books in 2020, but I don't have that book. This is probably from Dime Detective, since the Finnish pulp I'm researching used lots of material from Popular Publications.

EDIT: I found this, it was originally "For Auld Lang Crime", and it's from Dime Detective, Dec. 1950. 

Sex writer Peter Keyes's real name solved?

Collins in the cover of a pulp mag

I'm after a long, long hiatus getting back to my book on American sleaze paperbacks translated in Finnish (received a small grant for it).  It will be called "Pulpografia Erotica", and I believe it could be out sometime next year. Will probably self-publish it through Helmivyö, my own print-on-demand publishing house.

I have an entry for Peter Keyes, who wrote erotica mainly for Brandon House, titles like  The Love Odds (1967), Soft Savage Cat (1967), Love Formula (1967) ja Between Two Women (1968). He has three translations in Finnish, all from Brandon House.

I started digging out who he might have been. I had a note of him being really one A. V. Connors (don't know where this came from, possibly from Pat Hawk's pseudonyms catalog), but then I noticed the Catalog of Copyright Entries listed one of the sleaze novels by Peter Keyes for one Andrew J. Collins. I decided to check further and opened up the  Fictionmags Index. And bingo, there he was, having written a dozen crime stories for some pulp and early digest magazines in 1949-1950 and then one in 1960 for the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. No info on Collins, though. In WorldCat I noticed that a book (possibly a Western) called The Land Grabbers (Major 1975) was also released as by Peter Keyes. I couldn't find even a cover for the book, sadly. I googled once more with the book's and the writer's name, and came upon another copyright entry saying that the writer of The Land Grabbers was indeed Andrew J. Collins.

I should say it's safe to assume that sex writer Peter Keyes was pulp writer Andrew J. Collins. Any info on him would be of interest, alongside with the cover scan of The Land Grabbers.

I put a bibliographic entry for Collins up in my bibliography blog here.

PS. Here's an interesting article about Brandon House in New York Times in 1970.

PS2. I updated the bibliography of Collins, see here.

Friday's Forgotten Book: John Dinan: Sports in the Pulp Magazines

As I wrote in my earlier post, I have a new book out. It's a collection of articles and essays on different kinds of genre and pulp fiction, and there's also one on sports fiction. This essay I wrote specifically for the book, since I ordered John Dinan's book on the subject years ago, called Sports in the Pulp Magazines, thinking I could compile a small fictionmag around some pulp short stories, but to this day I haven't been able to come up with anything. I read the book and wrote the article, and now it's in the book. Since the book is in Finnish, here are some words on it in English. I'll try to keep this short, but we'll see how that comes about.

The first pulp magazines were of the general variety, but in the 1920's they started to specialize in certain genres. Sports were also beginning to get more professional at the same time, and the first sports celebrities, such as Jack Johnson, emerged. So some pulp magazine publishers started to publish magazines publishing only sports material, not only fiction, but also columns, interviews, biographies, stuff that resembles more sports journalism than what we usually associate with pulp magazines. The first sports pulp magazine was Sport Story Magazine, published by Street & Smith, one of the biggest pulp publishers. The first issue came out in 1923. The second sports pulp was Fight Stories, that started appearing in 1928. It specialized in boxing stories.

In the 1930's and especially after the Berlin Olympics there started to be more sports pulps, as the American readers were enthusiastic about the American athletes winning the games. In 1936 three more magazines were born: Ace Sports, Thrilling Sports, and Star Sports Magazine, and the next year saw eleven more. Some more came later in 1938 and 1939. The Second World War caused difficulties for the pulp mags and their publishers, but after the war there were more new magazines, but not so many as before the war. John Dinan points out interestingly that some of the pulp publishers also had a hand in organizing the sports leagues, such as Gerald Smith of Street & Smith. He was one of the founders of the All-American Football Conference that was supposed to compete with NFL.

Some of the sports pulps survived till the fifties, and the last ones were published as late as 1957. Some of the later mags include Ten Story Sports and Super Sports.

John Dinan has counted the number of different sports in Street & Smith's Sport Story Magazine. The results are not very surprising: the most popular sports were football, fighting and baseball, with basketball probably the fourth. Tennis, golf, track & field and ice hockey were also popular, but none of them had their own titles like the more popular disciplines, though the basketball titles weren't successful.

Dinan lists some of the better known sports authors, such as Robert Sidney Bowen and William Campbell Gault.  He lists also some authors known for their work in other genres who also dabbled in sports fiction, such as Max Brand, Johnston McCulley and Stephen Marlowe. He also writes quite widely about Robert E. Howard's Dennis Dorgan stories. There were also sports writers who wrote non-fiction for the pulps, such as Jack Kofoed. Dinan seems to have read some of the stories of these writers, but on some others he relies on other sources.

Dinan's book on the subject has lots of fascinating information, but it's not organized very well. I don't know why Dinan has decided to list some of the best known sports novels that have nothing to do with the pulp magazines, and he also claims Paul Gallico was a pulp writer, though most of his stuff came out in the slicks, such as Saturday Evening Post. Dinan's earlier work on the history of the pulp magazines, The Pulp Western, was riddled with errors and an assumption that the pulp mags were aimed for young readers, but Sports in the Pulp Magazines seems more solid in that regard. I didn't check all the details, but you can check some of the facts yourself here at the sports pulp magazine section of the Galactic Central/Fictionmags Index site.

I said at the beginning of this post that I've been thinking about compiling and publishing a sports fiction mag myself. I once had a permission to use one of Stephen Marlowe's sports stories (there weren't many to begin with), but I couldn't get my hand on them. (And then Marlowe died.) Now I have a permission to use a Robert Silverberg story (he wrote a handful in the late fifties, mainly on baseball), but I don't have any! If someone sees this and can send me a xerox or a scan or even a digital photo of a Silverbob sport story, I'd be a happy man! Interim, I've decided to compile an anthology of old Finnish sports stories, as I've come across quite a many while doing some other research on Finnish fictionmags.

More Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog here. Happy Holidays to each and everyone!

Charles Beckman's short story "The Dancing Death"?

As many of you probably know, pulp writer Charles Beckman who specialized in hardboiled and noir crime stories and wrote also for the western market has been seeing a revival of his work getting into print. (Here and here Amazon links for the new collections of his old stories.) Beckman is still alive and I was able to ask him via James Reasoner if I could a small collection of his work that's been translated in Finnish.

The collection would be with two stories. There's an old story in an old Finnish pulp magazine called Seikkailujen Maailma (The World of Adventures), and then there's a called story "Class Reunion" that was translated by my friend, Tapani Bagge, that appeared in a late crime fiction magazine called RikosPalat (Crime Bits or some such in English). Beckman gave me his permission. (There are also some three or four stories in the old issues of the Finnish edition of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but I don't have an easy access as to who translated them and where I could find them for a permission.)

After I'd typed "Class Reunion" I started typing the other story from the 1955 pulp mag. The Finnish title is "Tanssiva kuolema", which translates back as "The Dancing Death". The anti-hero of the story is one "Kippy Nikkeli" (I believe the name's been changed), who's on the run from some organized crime thugs, one of whom is called Pope (probably so, since his name is translated as "Paavi", which is the literal translation of "Pope"). In the beginning of the story Kippy finds himself in a junky joint trying to have a hamburger. It seems he hears voices in his head, and he also reminiscences another joint where he used to dance. He's also involving with Pope's mistress falling in love with another man. It's a moody noir-type piece where there no winners, only losers.

Now, there are several problems. Beckman himself didn't remember the story, nor did he find it in the pulp magazines he still has from his writing days. The story is not "Run, Cat, Run" that was reprinted in Beckman's Suspense, Suspicion & Shockers, nor is it "Should a Tear be Shed" in the same book, even though they share some similarities.

Googling the story's name with "Charles Beckman" doesn't give any clues. I don't have access to the crime fiction short story indices and I could check only the Fictionmags Index. There are some stories with the title "The Dancing Death", but none that match. Some of the stories listed therein did appear in a pulp magazine, but they seem to be a bit old or too long, i.e. serials. The story that I have at hand is more like a filler, even though it's a good story.

But there's a story called "Die Dancing, Kid" from Detective Tales, January 1947, and by Charles Beckman. Now, the publisher of Seikkailujen Maailma used lots of stories from the Popular Publications' magazines, such as Dime Detective and Detective Tales (and also Dime Mystery). I asked Beckman again if this could be our story. He said he doesn't remember writing that story and doesn't have a copy.

Now, does anyone have the issue of Detective Tales, January 1947, and can check the story out for me?

The photo accompanying this post is the illustration for the Finnish publication. For all I know, it could be the original illustration for Beckman's story.

David/Day Keene: The Queens of Death?

I bought this old Finnish paperback (published in 1947) with three short stories in it several months ago, mainly because it has a Zorro story in it. If I'm right, this is the only real Zorro story by Johnston McCulley published in Finnish. It's probably one of the later Zorro stories that were published in pulp magazines, such as West. I believe these stories have never been reprinted.

I didn't read the Zorro story in the book, but I read the two preceding stories. The first one that also gives the book its title is written by "David Keene". The title reads as "The Queens of Death". Now, there's no David Keene who has written any kind of crime novels or stories that I can find. I can't find any trace of a story called "The Queens of Death". Of course it's possible that this story was published in a pulp magazine no one has ever indexed, but somehow I don't think that's right. I got to thinking it might be possible this is really by Day Keene. The Finnish publisher may have thought that "Day" is not a right name for an author and changed him to "David". These things happen. And Day Keene happens to have a pulp story called "Three Queens of the Mayhem", published in Detective Tales in February 1946, so it's entirely possible that this story found its way to Finland and got published as part of a three-story anthology.

There are three old women in David Keene's story. They are old ladies living together. They were once famous singers called The Beverly Sisters, but getting caught in a murder case ruined their career. Now one of the sisters asks private eye called Tom Doyle to try to find a girl one of the sisters was forced to give away to an orphanage. The story is fun, mildly parodist in tone and plot. It's written strictly in the zany school of hardboiled writing, reminiscent of Robert Bellem, Richard S. Prather and others. So, is it "Three Queens of Mayhem"? Anyone? Or is it some other story by Day Keene? Or is there a David Keene?

There's also another short story to stir up interest. It's called "Kadonnut sävel", which means "The Lost Tune" or some such. The hero of the story is troubleshooter of some sort called Hannibal Smith. He's a former sports coach, but now makes his living selling used stuff, giving loans and doing services to people. Hannibal Smith is a fat man, but he's also resourceful and intelligent and quick with his mouth. Now, there's a Hannibal Smith story called "Down Among the Dead Men" published in Dime Detective in 1945, written by C. William Harrison, who's best known for his paperback westerns. (I've read one, it was pretty good.) I'm pretty sure this story is by the same C. William Harrison. Can anyone confirm? The story is funny as Hannibal Smith is asked to take a photo of a cow somewhere in the fields. He does exactly that, but fast he realizes he maybe shouldn't have, since he's being suspected of a murder...

The great Finnish cover is by Poika Vesanto. Probably - I can't find his signature in the cover.

Aviation magazine fresh off the printers

This one-shot magazine that I've been trying to compile and edit for some years now is finally out. The title means "The Heaven of Adventures" and the magazine features for old-style aviation stories, two old and two new. The new ones are by me (writing as "Jaakko Ensio", the story features dragons and zeppelins) and Petri Laine whose story is also retroish science fiction. The old ones are an old pulp story by Joe Archibald, translated by me, and a Finnish story from during the WWII, by Antero Aulamo, whose relatives have been very kind - this is already a third publication I'm doing with a story by Aulamo! I think there's more to come at some point.

The illustrations throughout the magazine are by Anssi Rauhala who did a marvellous job!

I've been thinking of compiling a whole book of old and new Finnish aviation stories. One of these days...

Vast archive of pulps on-line

Here's a link to the site that has lots of different magazines for on-line reading, with lots of pulp magazines included: Argosy, Weird Tales, Western Adventures, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Ranch Romances, Detective Fiction Weekly...

Harry S. Truman and Adventure

I seem to be taking more posts from other venues than write them myself, but when interesting things come up, I can't resist.

Here's Walker Martin on the pulp magazine, Adventure, and the US president Harry S. Truman. It's part of a discussion that started when someone had read that president Roosevelt had organized a writing contest for one of the detective pulps (turned out it was published as a serial in Liberty, which definitely wasn't a pulp, and later published as a book under the title of The President's Mystery Story; it was a so-called round robin novel, in which several known writers took turns writing the book).

I've also heard that Roosevelt read pulps, also Ike. But Harry Truman definitely read pulps. I have DEAR BESS, which is a collection of letters from Truman to his wife, 1910-1959. ADVENTURE MAGAZINE is listed in the index ten times. The magazine was evidently a favorite and Truman mentions it for the first time in 1911 and it is still mentioned 30 years later in 1941. In one 1911 letter he says "Adventure is the only magazine printed on cheap paper that I can read." In 1912 he mentions how his mother got scared reading a story in the magazine. In another letter he complains about serials in ADVENTURE and how he hates waiting 30 days for the next installment.

In 1913 he relates "I bought an Adventure last night and entertained myself with bloodcurdling stories on the train so I'd feel nice and comfortable..." More than once he mentions how a story in another magazine was good enough to appear in ADVENTURE.

Truman's love for the magazine only backs up the editors often mentioned fact that ADVENTURE was read by a wide spectrum of professional people including doctors, businessmen, lawyers, and government workers. Not to mention military men and typical tropical tramps (or as Adventure termed them TTT).

Animal stories in pulps

There has been a lively discussion at the PulpMags e-mail liston animal stories in the pulp magazines, with which the members of the list meant stories in which the animal is the protagonist, a point-of-view character or even a narrator. Gerald W. Page mentioned many authors who specialized in them: Jim Kjelgaard, Paul Annixter, Anthony Rud, Harold Cruikshank. Rud especially wrote lots of animal stories - Page mentions having read one in which the hero was an Octopus!

Page sums up the genre saying:

Animal stories were almost always short, and generally easy to plot. But I enjoy reading them; and in the western pulps when you come across one they're always much more welcome than another short, hastily written story about a cowboy searching for rustlers or a gunman going up against the old sheriff would be.

Page also mentioned stories with elephants: "There are a surprising number of stories about elephants in the pulps as well. I recall one by Anthony Rud and a few others, more vaguely", he said and continued:

One of the Singapore Sammy Shay stories collected in "South of Sulu," is about elephants. "The Pink Elephant" from the October 25, 1930 Short Stories. There's also a fine circus story about Elephants in the August 1948 issue of Blue Book. It's "Elephant Boss" by Robert Barbour Johnson and concerns the efforts of one of an assistant elephant handler trying to protect elephants from the cruelty of a new boss.

I weighed in saying that I've found a western short story by Bertrand Shurtleff in which the main animal is a seal (called Velveena; I don't know where the seal got her name, since she lives wild in nature) and one story by George Cory Franklin with a horse called Rustler. I think it narrates its own stories - I'm not sure, I should check the original story.

But what especially caught my eye was Morgan Holmes's idea for a dinosaur anthology. When asked, he specified the possible contents:

Let's see, as to dinosaur stories. There are the two by Paul L. Anderson in ADVENTURE. One is T. rex vs. Triceratops. Another is Mammoth vs. Sabertooth at tar pit. There are at least two dinosaur stories in Wonder Stories, ("One Prehistoric Night, and I think another called "When Reptiles Ruled"). There is a Paul Annixter story from ADVENTURE around 1931. You could mine some dinosaur stories from THRILLING WONDER STORIES in the late 30s. There are probably some in the Tremaine era ASTOUNDING. I know there is one from WEIRD TALES in 1930 plus another by Edmond Hamilton (can't think of the title right now). Could always throw in "Before the Dawn" by Temple.

Holmes also continued developing new anthologies:

There are probably enough cave man stories to fill a companion volume. Howard Devore told me at pulp con once about his idea for a cave man anthology. It had the usual suspects as de Camp's "The Gnarly Man" and del Rey's "The Day is Done." I would not be in favor of those two because they are over-known. Go for the more obscure stuff. There is enough cave man fiction in Ray Palmer era AMAZING STORIES to fill a book alone. You could use Paul L. Anderson's Cro-Magnon stories, Robert E. Howard's "Spear and Fang," P. Schuyler Miller's "People of the Arrow." There are some cave man stories by Clifford M. Eddy, Jr., a buddy of Lovecraft's in WEIRD TALES from around 1924. I think there is at least one by Charles Willard Diffin in TOP-NOTCH in the mid-30s. Might be a fun book.

The conclusion:

So we have in theory: PULP DOG STORIES, PULP HORSE STORIES, PULP ELEPHANT STORIES, PULP ANIMAL STORIES, PULP DINOSAUR STORIES, PULP CAVE MAN STORIES, and for the hell of it do PULP TARZAN IMITATION STORIES, PULP BARBARIAN STORIES, PULP LOST RACE STORIES.

L. Patrick Greene and James B. Hendryx

Here's another posting from pulp fan and SF/fantasy writer Gerald W. Page that he originally wrote on the PulpMags e-mail list. It's about L. Patrick Greene and James B. Hendryx, two old school pulp writers, and their series characters. (Greene on the left.)

As for Finnish translations, I believe Greene has only one novel, Timanttikuilu (published by Uusi Suomi in 1944 [must be the newspaper]), but I haven't been able to determine what the book's original title is. It's set in South Africa, that much I know without looking it up. As for Hendryx, there are some short stories translated from him, and I have an entry for him in my book Kuudestilaukeavat/Six Guns.

Both "The Major" and "Black John" are exceptional series, well written and entertaining, to say nothing of highly recommended.

L. Patrick Greene's stories of The Major are set in South Africa a few years later than H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain stories, which they hold a superficial and sometimes not-so-superficial resemblance to. The Major is an Illicit Diamond Buyer (IDB), active in the theft of diamonds and their smuggling out of South Africa. The adventures are varied and interesting,
with the setting and background adding a lot of flavor to stories that sometimes are rather similar to American Westerns.

The characters of both The Major and the Hottentot Jim are well-drawn and entertaining. Greene's attitude toward native Africans is worth noting. He obviously admires and respects them in many ways, but there is a racist attitude running through the stories that rises a bit above the Colonialist level. The n word occurs quite frequently in the stories -- which is probably nothing more than honest reporting of how people spoke in Rhodesia and South Afirca in the twenties, thirties and forties, but it can be jarring and offensive.

Some of the stories in Short Stories are obviously connected, with recurring villains and obvious plot connections that suggest Greene was writing with the intention of joining three or four novelettes into a book.

The Major stories, as said, began in Adventure but mainly showed up in Short Stories. (Did they appear in England first?) Later stories by Greene in Adventure, as well as in markets such as Fiction House's Jungle Stories, did not feature The Major but are set in South Africa. On the basis of what I've seen he never set a story outside South Africa.

James B. Hendryx wrote Northerns. I've seen a bare handful of westerns from him, but for all practical purposes he was a specialist in stories set in the Yukon Territory of Canada in the period of the Gold Rush of 1898.

Hendryx appeared frequently in Short Stories, Adventure, Argosy and other of the leading general fiction pulps. His Yukon stories are generally related in that he had an assortment of characters who moved from one series to another. His main characters, certainly in Short Stories, were Corporal Downey, a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman, and Black John Smith, an outlaw and con man who was sort of reformed and now ran a small community close to the Canadian-Alaskan border, where outlaws were welcome so long as they obeyed the law as interpreted by Black John while there. There was also a group of Sourdoughs who appeared often in various stories and series by Hendrix. I recently read a letter by him in Short Stories' "Story Teller's Circle" where he claimed the Sourdoughs were based on actual people he met in the Yukon during the twenties.

Hendryx was a highly professional writer with a good, non-obtrusive style and a graceful way of plotting. He could handle almost any type of story. About two months ago, for example, in either Short Stories or Adventure, I read a psychological short story by him (set in the Gold Rush) that, while not supernatural, was macabre enough that it could have appeared in Weird Tales. But most of his stories seem to be adventures, mysteries, or light humor.

The Black John stories are filled with humor, much of it sly and some of it edging toward black. Black John flees the U.S. after committing a robbery and finds a small comminuty on Halfaday Creek in the Yukon where many outlaws are holed up. Since most of them have arrived under an assumed name -- and since most of them assumed the name "John Smith," descriptive nicknames are added, so that the place is populated by the likes of One-armed John Smith, Pot Bellied John Smith, Red John Smith and so on. Now Black John and Old Cush, the proprietor of Cush's Fort, the general store, have set up a coffee name with slips of paper on which they've written names cribbed from a history book, so the newcomer can draw a name that isn't John
Smith, such as Alexander Jefferson or John Washington.

While Halfaday Creek is close enough to the line between Alaska and the Yukon that a man can avoid the police simply by taking a few steps westward, Black John instigates some rules. No murder, no robbery, etc. It doesn't matter what a man does before he comes to Halfaday Creek, but once he gets there, he better be an exemplary citizen. Black John doesn't believe in going to the law with his problems, so when a man of dubious character shows up, he deals with the problem, himself. And in the event, usually finds himself acquiring the man's ill-gotten gains. These are returned if the thief stole them from some individual or family. But if they belong to a
company or corporation, the money will end up in Black John's cache. Corporal Downey by now knows it's no use trying to arrest anyone in Halfaday Creek; but it doesn't matter because the people who live there don't break the law, at least not now.

If you have access to issues of Short Stories with these stories in them, I recommend them highly.

Alan G. Ampolsk on his father, true crime writer Bud Ampolsk

Some months ago I wrote about Art Crockett who wrote for the crime digests of the fifties and sixties here. I just received a comment from Alan Ampolsk, who is the son Bud Ampolsk, mentioned in my post. Bud Ampolsk wrote for the same mags and also did some editing, and I asked Alan his permission to post his comment on top of the blog. Some of the pennames he mentions may have been unknown before this.

Apologies for the late-arriving comment, but I've only just discovered your post. Bud Ampolsk was/is my father (for more on the indefinite tense, see www.dementianights.com). Art Crockett worked for him on most if not all of the books you mention - my father was editorial director, and Crockett was an assistant editor. Later the roles were reversed - in the 90's my father worked for Crockett.

Gerald's information is mostly accurate but his chronology is off on one point -- Crockett didn't move in sequence from the men's adventure books to the western to the crime books. They were all produced simultaneously, and Crockett worked on all of them. The publisher was Reese Publishing, which at its height was putting out 17 monthly titles (including the men's books -- they used a different corporate name for them but it was the same organization). My understanding is that Crockett worked on all of them throughout. He wound up as editor of the crime books at a time when Reese had folded most of the other titles, so that's why it seems that he moved from one to the other.

You won't find much of my father's stuff under his own name because - apart from some of the late true-crime work - he used a variety of pen names, including Don Unatin and Bill Ryder.

I'd be glad to try to fill you in more, as best I can. Unfortunately my father isn't able to remember any of this anymore, but I can work from what he told me and what I lived through. I hope that's of some value.

PS. It seems that linking to the Fictionmags Index doesn't work, since the index is in constant state of being updated. Putting up long bibliographies here on Pulpetti wouldn't work (even though I'm known to have done it to great success), so I created another blog: Pulpetti Bibliographic Section. Here's the biblio for Art Crockett's and Walt Hecox's (mentioned in the original posting) crime stories and here's the biblio for Bud Ampolsk's stories under the pennames his son mentions above.

I'm going to talk about these writers with Alan later on and I'll post here what comes up.