Pulp Adventures #34

Right on schedule Bold Venture Press has put out a new issue of Pulp Adventures, #34, for Winter 2019. This time with a cover by Albert Fisher from Front Page Detective in 1941, we get new and classic pulp stories that are mystery, science-fiction, and horror. For classic pulp fiction, we get a trio of different works from the prolific Robert Leslie Bellum, best known for this Dan Turner detective stories in the spicy pulps. “Death Do Us Part” is a one-off detective story that ran under his “William Decatur” pseudonym in Trojan’s Super-Detective. Trojan was the major spicy pulp publisher and was owned by Harry Donenfeld, who owned DC Comics. We also get two Dan Turner stories. One is a pulp story in Hollywood Detective, where he was the star, in 1946. The other is a comic strip that ran in Hollywood Detective, also in 1946. Yes, many of the spicy pulps ran short comic stories. For New Pulp, we get several works. The longest of these is “City of the Dead” by William M. Hope, which is a sword-and-sorcery tale starring his Thurl the Gaelg character, who last appeared in #32. As before, this is a world that includes Lovecraftian horrors, so here Thurl is targeted as the city’s next sacrifice! Can he avoid it? If not, we won’t get another tale of Thurl. Not quite a detective story, Logan Robichaud‘s “In a Sentimental Mood” has two FBI agents in the ’50s looking at an author of spy novels as a potential traitor. Adam Beau McFarlane returns to gives us a story set in WWII. “Comrade” is about rival tank crews and a card game that turns deadly. “On the Ego Identity of a Butterfly” is a strange little tale about a boy and his butterflies from Patti Boeckman and her daughter Sharla Wilkins. Patti is the wife of the late Charles Boeckman, a pulp writer whose works Bold Venture has been reprinting. Patti is an author as well, and this tale was finished by her daughter. A mix of science fiction, politics, and espionage is Charles Burgess‘s “Athena D,” dealing with a dangerous new Chinese satellite. Finally, Ron Reikki’s “Straight Ahead Into Darkness” is about an EMT dealing with tragedy. This issue end closes out the fifth year of this quarterly publication (or at least the fifth quartet of volumes). The quality of this magazine, both in its selection of stories and its design, has remained at a high level. I look forward to the next issue, which I’m sure will be soon. I do know we will get science fiction from E.C. Tubb. Whatever we get should be good.