Pulp Adventures #23

Pulp Adventures #23 (Fall 2016) begins the third year of this revised pulp fanzine from Bold Venture Press. As always, we get a collection of classic and New Pulp fiction (with some notes) and even some pulp comics, under a George Rozen cover (a detective one, from a spicy pulp). In the area of old pulp, we start off with “Luck” by Theodore Roscoe, which appeared in Short Stories in 1941. This one is set at a horse track. We also get an short article on Roscoe, who is probably best known for his series about Thibault Corley of the Foreign Legion, which has been reprinted by Altus Press. Bold Venture is planning on reprinting some other books by Roscoe in 2017, and has reprinted a biography on him as well. We also get a Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective story from spicy author Robert Leslie Bellem that appeared in Hollywood Detective in 1946, which is featured on the cover. There is also a sidebar that explains the terms Bellem uses in his stories. Feel free to impress your friends with your new vocabulary! There is also a story set in a circus that comes from Thrilling Publications’s West in 1948. The artwork included with this story was pretty interesting. I wonder what other work Sam Cherry did? A very different reprint is an article by Charles Dickens, written several years after A Christmas Carol, that appeared in Dickens’ own weekly magazine that ran from 1850 to 1859. This came from 1851. In the area of New Pulp fiction, we have a sf tale with a very different hero created by TJ Morris. In “Legends of LA,” we get a ordinary man in post WWI Hollwood becomes Quirt, a western-style vigilante to stand up to the Mob. Wonder if we’ll see more stories with this character? And Richard A. Lupoff has another story, a recent one of crime in a summer camp. Adam Beau McFarlane returns with a third new Sherlock Holmes story, this time a holiday themed one where Holmes helps Ebeneezer Scrooge with another ghost. And not to leave out comics, unlike the last issue we just get one page of such at the end. A kind of poor man’s Ripley’s, “Adventure Thrills” is from Thrilling Adventures.