Pulp Reprints: Collected Stories of the Sea by Neil Martin

Neil Martin (1885-1963) was brought up in Laredo, Texas. The Galveston hurricane of 1900 devastated his family and caused him to take up life as a sailor, before an accident made him leave the sea. By the late 1920s, he was out of work and looking for a way to earn a living. At the time of the Great Depression, there wasn't much work for him to do. Luckily for him, he was a good storyteller and had sold a couple of stories to Top Notch (published by Street and Smith) and Danger Trails (published by William Clayton).

He started off on a writing career then, writing sea stories and westerns for magazines like Sea Stories and Five Novels Monthly. This phase of his career lasted till the early 1940s, when he shifted markets to Short Stories magazine, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith. He started writing exclusively for Short Stories, and his series of stories about Henry Pou, a Cajun lawman in Louisiana, was a hit with readers.

Three of his stories were given cover illustrations as well.

His pulp writing career ended when the pulps declined in the 1950s. He passed away in 1963.

Coming back to the book under review:

This collection features four pieces from the magazine, Five Novels Monthly and one from Short Stories. It seems to have been put together by a descendant, William Neil Martin (possibly a grandson). It has an introduction with some biographical information, but no photo of the author.

The four pieces from Five Novels Monthly are:  Forbidden Seas from December 1931, Eastward Passage from September 1933, Thunder Over the Mast from March 1938 and Shanghaied! from January 1939. I enjoyed them all, though the romantic element felt a little out of place and formulaic. In each, the hero falls in love with the heroine whom he rescues, but hardly any words are exchanged between them. I have not read any other stories from Five Novels Monthly, so I don't know if this was a general feature of all stories in that magazine.

Forbidden Seas is a long story of a quest for a fortune in mammoth ivory hidden on a Russian island before the Russian Revolution. Three people are after the ivory, a rogue trader who has managed to suborn a Russian gunboat commander to give him exclusive trading rights, our hero and the heroine who is the daughter of the man who cached the ivory.

Eastward Passage is the story of a couple of thieves after a pair of legendary pearls called the Twin Moons, being carried by a trader. They pursue them through a shipwreck and a mutiny.

Shanghaied! starts with the hero waking up on a whaling ship with a blinding headache and no memory of how he got there. He has to get back to shore by a certain date to claim an inheritance and there seems to be no way for him to do that. To complicate matters, the heroine shows up

Thunder before the mast starts with a sick man being brought aboard a cargo ship by his sister. Before she can get back, the crew, led by a pair of thieves, mutinies in an attempt to steal the cargo of gold that the ship is carrying. The mutineers need the captain to sail the ship, and uses the heroine to blackmail him. There's a storm on the way, and the captain uses that to his advantage.

First Command, (Short Stories, 25 May 1940), has the hero against two adversaries, an unknown person sabotaging the ship he's sailing on, and the captain of the ship, who is trying to sabotage his career and his love life.

An enjoyable read overall. The stories are well written, and the heroes think instead of merely punching or shooting their way out. You can get the paperback or the ebook.

Ebook: Collected Stories of the Sea

Commander Edward Ellsberg's books and auto-biography reissued

Good news. The books of Commander Ellsberg, about whom I wrote earlier in this blog, and his multi-volume auto-biography, have been republished.

The story of Commander Ellsberg: part 1, part 2, part 3

The not so good news is that they are available only in ebook format. However, you can read them on your computer, on your tablet, your smart phone or your Kindle ebook reader.

From Murania Press comes The Island, sequel to Barehanded Castaways by J. Allan Dunn

I enjoyed the original novel, which was a very realistic Robinson Crusoe kind of adventure, first published in Adventure magazine.

The novel was written by J. Allan Dunn in response to a challenge from Adventure's editor to write a realistic shipwreck novel of survival, with no "convenient coconuts or self sacrificing fish"

http://muraniapress.com/classic-pulp-reprints/now-available-the-island/

The sequel promises to be as interesting as the original. I'm going to pick it up next week at Windy City Pulp and Paper 2015.

If you already bought Barehanded Castaways, you can buy the sequel here:
http://muraniapress.com/book/the-island/

If you didn't buy it earlier, both books are available in a bundle with a 20% discount:
http://muraniapress.com/book/barehanded-castaways-the-island/

New releases from Black Dog Books

Six new releases from Black Dog Books across the Hardboiled, Spy/Thriller,  Classic Detective, and Science Fiction genres. I know what I'm going to get at Windy City, and if you aren't going there, click on the links below to get the books and go here to read more about them.

Update: Added original publication information for the books:

The Garden of TNT stories featuring the Red Wolf of Arabia originally appeared in Blue Book magazine in the 1930s and the 1940s.

Hugh Pendexter’s Jeff Fanchon stories appeared in Short Stories magazine from 1916 to 1917.

Tarrano the Conqueror appeared as a serial from 1925 to 1926 in Science and Invention magazine, published by Hugo Gernsback.

The Dallas Duane stories by James P. Olsen appeared in Spicy Western and other magazines from the same publisher: Spicy Detective, Spicy Adventure, Private Detective, Super Detective, Fighting Western and Private Detective.

The Roger Torrey stories in various magazines.

Beginning with Murder	Romantic Detective	Feb 1939
Double Trouble	Private Detective Stories	Dec 1942
Foreign Affair	Private Detective Stories	May 1941
Winner Take Nothing	Private Detective Stories	May 1940
Death Has an Escort	Private Detective Stories	Oct 1942
Three Women and a Corpse	Private Detective Stories	Jan 1943
A Death in the Family	Dime Detective Magazine	Jun 1 1934

 

Argosy reprints from Altus Press

Lately, it seems like we've been getting a lot of reprints from the general fiction pulps

Adventure - Talbot Mundy, Arthur O. Friel, Marion Polk Angellotti, Farnham Bishop and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, H.D. Couzens, Harold Lamb, Captain Dingle, Hugh Pendexter, Gordon MacCreagh, Arthur Howden-Smith etc.

Blue Book - H. Bedford-Jones

Short Stories - James B. Hendryx, L. Patrick Greene

Argosy - George F. Worts, Theodore Roscoe, Arthur Leo Zagat

As you can see, we've had a lot of reprints from Adventure but less from the others. Today, Altus Press is working on changing that in part - with a series of reprints from Argosy magazine. The painful part of collecting Argosy is all the serials - you never get all the issues of a serial that you want to read. And more than half of any given issue is serials, which means it takes a long time to collect Argosy before you can read them. I have a few in a box waiting for gaps to be filled. So this is great news - you can read the stories without waiting ages.

The first set of reprints has stories by Lester Dent (better known as the man behind Doc Savage), W. Wirt, Otis Adelbert Kline, W.C. Tuttle, Charles Alden Seltzer, George F. Worts, Fred MacIsaac, Philip Ketchum, Victor Rousseau and Theodore Roscoe. A great selection covering the sword and planet, westerns, humor, crime, lost world and science fiction genres - it showcases how much variety there was in Argosy fiction. Enjoy.

Releasing from Altus Press today. So head over there and check it out. I'm going to get these as soon as I can.

Recent books I've enjoyed

This list shouldn't surprise anyone who hasn't been hiding in a cave all summer. Altus Press has been doing an excellent job reprinting some very good authors, many of whom have been featured on this site. I have linked to the Ebook editions which are an excellent deal at $2.99 each; the books are also available in paperback and hardback directly from Altus Press.

Collection of Frank Gruber's Black Mask short stories about Oliver Quade, Encyclopedia salesman just released

MysteriousPress just released the complete short stories of Oliver Quade, encyclopedia salesman. These stories originally appeared in the Thrilling Detective and Black Mask magazines.

Kevin Burton Smith has an excellent summary of the Oliver Quade series over at the excellent Thrilling Detective website.

I have the earlier collection Brass Knuckles, and when this released, I bought it in ebook format immediately to read the four stories that were not collected in that book. The stories are light, fun reads. If you read one or two at a time, they're good. Otherwise you might overdose on Gruber's pulp formula.

Links to the books in Ebook and paperback formats:

Ebook	Paperback

Review of the Pirates of the Pines by A.M. Chisholm

Treasure Island was a very successful book in 1883, gaining critical acclaim and popularity for its author, R.L. Stevenson, who until then had not been successful. It is still in print today, and has never been out of print since its first appearance in print.

Stevenson tells a rousing story of a boy becoming a man in a hunt for treasure while battling against pirates, and his characters are memorable –impulsive Jim Hawkins, the morally ambiguous pirate Long John Silver, the evil blind pirate Pew, the dogged Dr. Livesey, the bumptious yet likable Squire Trelawney and many others. Stevenson’s gift for capturing scenes in dramatic detail, a product of his childhood playing with a theatre set of toys, served him well in this book. Like that other great Victorian children’s novel, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island was born when Stevenson told his stepson a story to pass an idle rainy day.

The success of Treasure Island inspired many sequels and prequels, with Arthur Howden Smith penning one of the best prequels – Porto Bello Gold. Pirates of the Pines, originally published in 1915 as the Fur Pirates in the Popular Magazine, is A.M. Chisholm’s homage to Treasure Island. A.M. Chisholm was a writer of western and north-western stories and was one of the main contributors to the Popular Magazine, with an average of five stories every year in the nineteen twenties and thirties.

Introduction to Pirates of the Pines, from the editor of the Popular Magazine

Chisholm takes the central plot of Treasure Island and relocates it in the far north of Canada, where rivers take the place of roads, and forests are like seas where you can go for days without seeing anyone on the horizon. While Chisholm borrows the plot from Stevenson, the characters in the story are all his own – they speak in their own north woods dialect and have distinct personalities. I was unable to locate the area he uses as the setting; I did find a river named Carcajou and a lake named Atikameg, but they are so far apart as to make the story impractical. I particularly liked the beginning:

IF it were not for Peggy I should not write this story at all. Peggy is my niece, and I am very fond of her and she knows it. So when she got the idea in her glossy young head we both knew very well what would happen, although I objected that there was no woman in the story except that other Peggy who, being my sister, did not count, and the klootchman Lucille, who was most certainly not a heroine. But Peggy overrode me grandly by saying she was tired of wilderness heroines who crop up where no white man would think of taking a woman. There was something in that.

But I protested further that though I had told the yarn often enough it was quite a different matter to write it. “Bosh!“ said Peggy. “Write it just the way you tell it.”

So I was up against the iron there, too. I do not know just how to make a proper literary start; but, as with most other work, perhaps the main thing is to get started somehow.

My name is Robert Cory. I do not remember my mother. My father, who taught history in a college which is not necessary to name, died when I was a little shaver, and when his friends came to dig into his affairs they found that he had very little money and insurance and only one relative on so far as they could ascertain, a brother who lived in the wilderness that fringed the Carcajou. And so my sister Peggy and I, two forlorn little waifs, were packed off to him, and no doubt everybody was glad to be rid of us.

Now our Uncle Fred, though college bred like my father, had been a rolling stone. But finally he had taken up land on the Carcajou, in the belief that it would someday be valuable, and, of course, as everybody knows now, he was right. But at that time he was land poor. He had several thousand acres of farm and timber lands on which he was hard pressed to make even the small payments required by the government, but often he had not enough money to buy flour.

He worked a scant thirty acres with the help of one man, a slow-moving, lanky, one-eyed Scandinavian named Gus Swanson. This gave him subsistence. And for more he waited till the march of settlement west and north should strike him; and the slow years never shook his faith, which has since been amply justified.

Peggy was his favorite, and from the first she could twist him around her finger, just as the other Peggy now twists me, and to me he was more like an elder brother than an uncle.

And so, you see, as a boy my life was bounded by the Carcajou. I had only faint recollections of anything different. Its waters and bordering forests made up my world, with which I was very well content. In summer, when old enough, I helped in the gar den and fields, and fished and gathered wild berries in season for Peggy to do down against the winter. And in winter I fished through the ice, and set my small line of snares and traps for rabbit and muskrat and mink and fox; and even for the great, silver-gray, soft footed, tuft-eared lynx.

And yet it must not be supposed that Peggy and I grew up like young savages. We had our schoolbooks and our regular hours for study, and our uncle taught us, having been no doubt at much pains to brush up his rudiments.

The plotting had to be changed to fit the new locale (you can’t imagine the narrator stealing a ship in a forest), and Chisholm does a masterly job of changing the elements while retaining the flavor of the original. Murania Press’ reprint of this excellent story is well done, with high quality, easy to read typography and no errors that I could find. The cover is an excellent illustration from Frank Schoonover and suits the book perfectly. If you like adventure stories, this book is for you. To read the first four chapters of the book, click here.

Altus Press reprints from Dime Detective and Black Mask

 

We live in an amazing time when a lot of pulp stories are being reprinted. Reprints from Altus Press (wide range of pulpy stuff), Black Dog Books (focuses on adventure pulps) and Haffner Press (concentrates on science fiction and fantasy, with some detective stuff as well), to mention a few, are doing an amazing job of selecting the best pulp stories and reprinting them.

For detective and mystery lovers, there is a lot to look forward to this fall. Altus Press has an amazing line of reprints from Black Mask and Dime Detective lined up.

Robert Sampson in Yesterday’s Faces – The Solvers:   The MacBride-Kennedy stories were one of Nebel’s major contributions to the magazine. Not as poetic as Chandler, not as realistically detailed as Hammett, the series is an extended masterpiece of hardboiled fiction, violence wrapped around a core of pity. MacBride and his wayward cops are unlike any police you meet in more gritty police procedurals. But in spite of their imperfect professional techniques, they come alive. They move through that terrible world you sometimes sense behind the headlines, that fouled place where graft, corruption, and murder are customary.   A comprehensive introduction to the series can be found at the Black Mask Magazine site.
	James Reasoner on Vee Brown:   Brown is one of the first playboy/detectives, but unlike Bruce Wayne or Richard Curtis Van Loan, his activities as a cop are known to all while the source of his considerable wealth is a secret. This leads a newspaper reporter to investigate him, and the reporter is the narrator of the story, not Brown, which makes for a considerable difference from Daly's yarns about Race Williams. The prose is more restrained, though it can get get pretty lurid in the action scenes. And Vee Brown is an interesting character, small and unathletic, but deadly with a gun and willing to meet the criminals on their own ground and deal out his own brand of justice. Cultured, well-educated, and wryly humorous even as he's gunning down the villains, it's almost like Niles Crane became the Spider instead of Richard Wentworth.
From the Thrilling Detective site:   CASS BLUE's a New York private dick who appeared in several short stories in Dime Detective back in the thirties. With his hard-ass attitude, a conveniently flexible set of morals and a blackjack on his hip, he's ready for just about anything. His pals include speakeasy owner Al Lascoine, who serves up booze and alibis.   The stories are all rendered in pulpster Lawrence's trademark first person, over-boiled prose style, full of gunfights and plot holes. Lawrence may not have been much of a writer, but he sure knew how to slap together the usual suspects to make a slam-bang action story.
	From the Thrilling Detective site:   Lawrence is probably best known for his tales of The Broadway Squad, the most ruthless, vicious gang of thugs to ever pin on badges in the pulps.   Courtesy alt.pulp:   Marty Marquis was an amoral detective in charge of a squad of thieves, extortionists and murderers, who were cops.
Walker Martin on Mr. Maddox (courtesy Mysteryfile):   Flynn’s major detective effort was the long running Mr Maddox series in Dime Detective. Between 1938 and running into 1950 he appeared at least 35 times, all of them long novelets, some close to 20,000 words. Each story was a mystery/detective tale starring Joe Maddox, a racetrack bookie who along with his sidekick, Oscar, was always involved in complex murder cases. His nemesis was a cop named Cassidy.   Now frankly, when I first started reading these stories in 1969 and 1970, I did not particularly like them at all. They were ok but definitely not favorites of mine. However, as I continued collecting Dime Detective and completing my set(274 issues), I realized that this was the longest running series by far and must of been very popular with the readers. So I kept giving him a chance and reading others in the series and you can guess what happened. I began to love the character and the stories.   Give Mr Maddox a try and you too might become a fan of “The Bland Buddha Of the Bangtail Circuit”.
	Ron Goulart on the Rambler in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine:   Murphy shared his creator’s peripatetic inclinations. In the dozen and a half Rambler yarns he crisscrossed the country, working as a reporter on big  metropolitan tabloids and small-town sheets. He generated front-page stories that unmasked gambling kingpins, cunning kidnappers, tommyguntoting hoodlums and once a “night-shirted order that [combined] the worst features of the Ku Klux and the Black Legion.” In all of the Rambler adventures certain things were certain. Murphy would always get a job on a newspaper, he would meet an attractive and bright young woman, he would crack a baffling case, and then, no matter how tempted to stay, would resume his rambles.
Can anyone help here? I couldn’t find anything online. Edit: From a comment by Walker Martin below: The Keyhole Kerry series lasted for 8 novelets during 1937-1939. He was a sort of Walter Winchell type reporter that had his own radio show and was constantly getting involved in murder cases. Another interesting series character from Fred Davis who was cranking out unusual detective series characters for editor Ken White at DIME DETECTIVE during the mid-thirties through the 1940's period.
	Hugh B. Cave:   Tough, cantankerous Inspector Allhoff, who lost his legs in a shoot-out with crooks armed with a machine-gun, lives across the street from Police Headquarters in a slum tenement building and solves intricate mysteries while guzzling endless cups of coffee. Allhoff is one of the characters who graced the lively pages of Dime Detective Magazine in the heyday of that magazine's highly successful career. These Inspector Allhoff stories are great detective mystery yarns, mostly developed via lively dialogue between Allhoff and his colleagues, and told in the first person by one of the colleagues. And from myself: I have enjoyed all the stories of Inspector Allhoff I've read so far in the collection, Footprints on the Brain.

Black Mask - recent reprints

 Recently, I've been seeing an increasing number of reprints from Black Mask, the hard-boiled crime fiction magazine magazine. Black Mask was the magazine that first published authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the creators of the American private eye story. Otto Penzler, the editor of the Black Mask series of reprints, talks about it in this video.

Today, issues of Black Mask at it's peak routinely sell above 100$, putting it out of reach for most people. Thankfully, the reprints aren't priced so high and they're pulling out the best stories from Black Mask.

The first two books are recent reprints, and the third is _the_ definitive collection of stories from Black Mask.

 

	Ebook only

Altus Press have just released a bunch of ebooks

Enjoy.