Pulp Adventures #43

I recently obtained Pulp Adventures #43 from Bold Venture Press, dated Spring-Summer 2023. That’s a little weird, as the last issue was Winter-Spring. We get science fiction, detective, crime, supernatural, and more this time. As always, we get a selection of new and classic pulp stories, along with some non-fiction works. We have ballooned up to almost 200 pages. though due to many of these working being longer, we don’t get the variety that comes from shorter pieces. Hopefully, they can get back to a quarterly basis. This is the ninth year of publication for the new version of Pulp Adventures. The cover for #42 is an original, and I’m not sure of the source or the artist. It ties to the featured story, the novelette “The Little Grey Man” by British author Norman Firth (1920-49). This saw print in book form back in 1949 as Borrowed Love. This is a hard-boiled tale of crime and retribution, centering around a man who deserts from the Foreign Legion and returns to England where his twin brother is. He thinks he will have an easy future, but it won’t be. For classic pulp, we get a pair of stories. Though to be honest, neither of these appeared in a true pulp magazine. Judson P. Philips (1903-89) is fairly well known in the pulps. He wrote the long-running Park Avenue Hunt Club, which I wish someone would publish in an inexpensive paperback edition. He also wrote using several pseudonyms, one of which is Hugh Pentecost. Bold Venture Press has reprinted several of his works, including all four of his Lt. Luke Bradley series. Here they reprint a short story from Smart Set magazine in 1921 titled “In Pleasant Places.” It was published under his Philip Owen pseudonym. Accompanying it are two articles. One is an overview of him by Audrey Parente, who wrote a biography on Philips. The other is a personal remembrance of working for him in his summer theater group by Sue Lawless. “Solitude” is by John Glasby, and appeared in the Supernatural Stories book series in 1963. This tale tells of a man who returns to Borneo with something but has to deal with issues with his wife and others and doesn’t go as he expected. For New Pulp, this time we get: From Jack Halliday is “Bedhead Fred’s, Redhead’s Dead,” a short PI tale of murder. You’ll need to read the story to get the title. I’ve read several of Teel James Glenn’s tales, but “Music Box Warrior” is the first war story of his that I’ve read. Set in WWII, it’s about a unit in the Ardennes trying to get in contact with other forces. But it’s never easy in war. “Finder’s Fee” by Scott Turick is a science-fiction tale set on a distant world ravaged by a strange plague. Our hero is asked to find a missing daughter, but there is much more to it than that. We also get some non-fiction works. From Joe Lovece is a brief overview of Spring-Heeled Jack, who was used a few times as a heroic, almost superheroic, character in a series of unconnected British penny dreadful series. James Reasoner provides a review of The Ranch Cat (1951), a western paperback by William Hopson. And finally Will Murray provides a long article on the later Spider stories and their possible authorship. I had always thought of them by Norvell Page, but there are some questions about that. We are promised the next issue to come out toward the end of summer and will include a new story by Stuart Hopen about Scaramouche, a character I know from the 1950s swashbuckler starring Stewart Granger, Janet Leigh, and Mel Ferrer and based on the 1921 novel by Rafael Sabatini. Sounds like fun!