10-Story Book, February 1928 - The South Sea Island and Tropical Number / Thornton Jenkins Hains

An odd follow-up tonight to the Christmas edition of the Wild West Weekly from 1936 I shared last time here on Darwination Scans, perhaps, but that's how it happens sometimes in our periodical explorations.  I present the February 1928 edition of 10-Story Book.  For those of us buried in snow and Winter blues, how about a brief sojourn in hotter climes?

image at Flickr, model unknown

10-Story Book v28n02 (1928-02) (Darwination).cbr

Full high-resolution scan available for download here, or you can read it online or find a .pdf format at the Internet Archive here.

Cover design and layout is from Charles Oglesby Longabaugh who I know very little about, but from the sporadic credits I've seen, it's his distinctive lettering and design that make the covers of 10-Story Book so alluring.  Always a mix of red, whites, blacks, and occasionally greens and almost invariably featuring a bit of cheesecake, you know you've got something spicy as soon as you have your hands on this little magazine out of Chicago.  "A Magazine for Iconoclasts," 10-Story Book was published almost continuously on a monthly basis from 1901 to early 1940 and was edited by Harry Stephen Keeler from about 1919 through the rest of the magazine's existence.  Keeler, an odd duck to say the least, is known by some for his detective fiction and by others for his science fiction, but I know him mainly as a magazine editor.  His wife, Hazel Goodwin Keeler, whose work often appears embedded in his novels, was similarly entwined in the production of the magazine, and a couple of her illustrations feature within this issue. The formula for the magazine was fairly steady - a number of illustrated shorter stories were mixed in with copious amounts of "girl photos" and cartoons.  Some of the fiction was reprint material, but much was original features from up and coming authors, down and out authors, or authors who just didn't know what to do with a particularly odd piece of fiction.  Most often an issue has a theme like "The Weird Story Number" or "The Crook Story Number" or "The Artists' Number," and there were a good number of "Big Photos Numbers" as well with the promise of girl photos (often taken from French postcards) always at the forefront.  

Before we go exploring the issue, let me go right to why I scanned it.  When writing my last post on Paul Power's Pulp Writer, I noticed in his early bibliography at Fictionmags an appearance in 10-Story Book and immediately recognized the cover from my collection (it's an absolutely striking cover), so I pulled it from the vault right away for scanning.  In Powers' memoir he talks about being paid (on publication) by the fledgling (and later legendary) Weird Tales for his earliest fiction work.  At the time, he'd been doing mostly joke and gag writing but hoping to break into the fiction game.  I'd hope to find an early piece of Paul Powers fiction in this 10-Story, but here's what I found, "Jones Tells of His Trip to Mexico":

Illustrated by Jo Metzer.  Sometimes comedy gets lost in translation.  Here translation is supposed to be the comedy.  A gag concept that could be used for an artist drawing would pay more than a straight joke, so hopefully Powers made a few bucks on this one. No worries, as his he'd hit paydirt as a writer for Street & Smith westerns soon enough.

On to the rest of the issue, starting with the inner cover. 10-Story Book lets us know that this issue is so daring that the regular brand of raciness can't even raise an eyebrow where we're going, South Seas, ahoy!

Russian dancer Elizaveta "Lila" Nikolska as God made her.  Nudity is apparently the norm in the South Seas, but 10-Story Book readers interest might be quickly piqued.  Lila on the cover of a French mag a year earlier where they experimented with color a bit before we did in the states as far as the risque photo covers go.  Paris Plaisirs June 1927.  Design by French great Georges Leonnec:

Our issue's contents, a lovely page, likely laid out by Longabagh.  A typical jazz-age hand-drawn layout, an exercise in silhouette and symmetry:

Image at Flickr

So, the allure of the South Seas...  10-Story Book would have at least a few of these tropical and island numbers.  For starters, there's the obvious curiosity that island girls live topless.  Then there's the literary tradition of Melville's Typee or Jack London's South Sea Tales or Henry de Vere Stacpoole's The Blue Lagoon where life on these islands stands in idyllic contrast to the rigidity and constant labor of life in the first world.  Also, there's a greater liberty given nudity when there's an anthropological context (ala bare-breasted women in grandad's National Geographics).  

I make an effort here to shy away from trigger warnings regarding racism and stereotypes in hundred year old magazines, but in this issue you do see the word nigger bandied about casually and a sort of slack-jawed gawking at the savages.  It's not as simple as that, though, as there's also jealousy and admiration for those that are able to live apart from the vagaries and economies of the so-called civilized world.  Notably, a lot of the space that would typically go to girlie photos in a 10-Story Book are in this issue devoted to pictures of natives. Oddly, any native scene seems to do, as there are photos from South America and Africa and elsewhere that don't fit with the theme of island life.  Forgive, though, as in the 20s magazines and newspapers were still one of the few ways an American might get a glimpse of the wider world.

So, as is often the case when I scan and read a magazine, one story leads to another, and for this mag, it's the opener, "Nuki-Heva Head" by Captain T. Jenkins Hains, that sent me down a rabbit hole.  The splash page:

Nuki-Hiva Head is a middling tale in a humorous vein about the Whaler William Lee's struggle to retain its crew in the Marquesas.  An ode to the beauty of the island girls, men leave the Whaler to get goods ashore and never come back.  Even the Captain falls for the lure of the islands and its berries, and the narrating first mate is forced to pilot the ship back to civilization with only his island bride.  There's plenty of nautical lingo involved in the feat of only two people piloting a large whaler and the feel of a tall tale being told.  The decision of most of the crew to abandon ship is not made to seem unreasonable.  It's no mystery why a whaler wouldn't actually often get too close to some of these islands :D

But it's not this story that sucked me in here, it's the story of the author, Thornton Jenkins Hains. Hains began his literary career in the Argosy but quickly moved to higher-end magazines and wrote sea tales for Harper's, McClure's, The Metropolitan, Cosmopolitan, and The Century as well as being published in hardcover. But, come 1906, Hains must have caught the eye of Charles Agnew MacLean at Street & Smith under whose editorship The Popular Magazine had exploded in circulation and mass appeal.  MacLean's philosophy on simple and direct language and a good story as the most compelling feature of literature made The Popular almost instantly successful.  His nose for talent led to the discovery of the likes of Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, Jack London, Mary Rinehart Roberts, Octavus Ray Cohen and others. I mean to write about The Popular some other time, as I view its success and expansion as a eureka(!) moment for pulp in the earliest part of the century and have found some great material in issues I've scanned, but, for now, I'll just share here the first issue that Hains appears in, February 1906, which features his tale "The Dutch Ghost":

 

Color scan here, black and white version here, or read online or download at the IA here.  A hearty cheer to a great patron of the pulps, Laris Bullock, for donating this issue along with an entire box of Populars to me for scanning through Pulpscans, just a small portion of the the books he's donated to the cause of digital preservation (in addition to sharing his knowledge of the stories and authors).  

As The Popular grew in circulation, it offered steady and high-paying work to favored authors, and Hains must have fit this category, as audiences seemed to take a liking to his sea stories and recurring characters like The South Sea Traders, Bahama Bill, and Hammerhead Jones.  Starting with the above issue, Hains would appear almost every single month in The Popular into late 1908 at which point Hains would become involved in a murder trial that would be splashed across front pages of newspapers across the nation and something of a turning point in matrimonial murder cases as well as uses of the insanity defense. 

Thornton Jenkins Hains, though successful as a writer who imagined himself in mold of Conrad and Melville, was the black sheep of the family.  His father, Peter Conover Hains, was at West Point with George Armstrong Custer and ordered the first artillery shot at the Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle in the Civil War.  His real claim to fame is an engineer, as he designed the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., eliminating drainage and odor problems in the Capitol's marshlands after floods.  He also lobbied and participated in the design of the Panama Canal over the proposed canal in Nicaragua.  Later he'd become the only officer to serve in both The Civil War and WWI.  Thornton's younger brother, Peter, was a successful officer in the Army.  While Peter was serving abroad, Thornton wrote that his young bride, Claudia Libbey, was engaging in salacious behavior.

When Peter returned, his wife denied any dalliances, but Peter kept a close eye on her over the next two years becoming convinced she was having an affair with his good friend, William Annis who was either the Editor or Advertising Director of the Burr-McIntosh Monthly (A gorgeous magazine that I can't believe I don't own any issues of).  

On August 15, 1909, accompanied by Thornton, Peter went to Annis' yacht club on the day of a ladies' regatta.  As Annis' got out of his boat having won the race, Peter emptied his eight shot revolver into Annis' chest at point-blank range as Thornton stood guard with his own gun drawn.

The San Francisco Call of August 17, 1908 describes the scene:

A cold-blooded murder in broad daylight at the yacht club, egad, and became known in the papers as the Hains-Annis Case or simply "The Regatta Murder." Another sinister facet is that Thornton Hains had been involved in the killing years prior as a young man of his best friend, also at point blank with a pistol. Again from the San Francisco Call August 17:

 

After this first murder, Thornton was ostracized and left Baltimore for Florida and locations and journeys unknown around the globe for a number of years until his re-emergence as a writer years later.

When the brothers faced trial for the Regatta Murder their defense was well-funded by their father.  For Peter, the defense was "Dementia Americana" aka "the unwritten law" that a husband might be driven for a short time out of his mind and driven to kill his wife's lover.   Despite having no real legal grounds, this had long been a traditional defense in this type of murder.  More unconventional was Thornton's defense, "folie à deux," wherein one man's insanity becomes shared by another.  During months at trial, various psychiatric experts of varying qualifications testified against each other about the merits of these arguments.  In the end, Peter was found guilty of Manslaughter while Thornton was found not guilty of the same.  Peter was given eight years, but in two years was pardoned by the governor.

Following the verdict, there was an outcry against "the unwritten law" and a firming of what psychiatric defenses should be allowed in court and what constitutes an expert in the field.  Thornton Jenkins Hains faced no punishment but a tarnished reputation.  His stories would no longer appear in the slicks.  In the pulps, he would shift to the alias Mayn Clew Garnett to escape public notice and continued to appear in The Popular, Top-Notch, Short Stories, and other pulp magazines.

Thornton Hain's next bit of notoriety would come on the heels of the Titanic disaster, as his story as M.C. Garnett in the May 1 1912 edition of The Popular Magazine, "The White Ghost of Disaster," which was had already been printed when the Titanic sank on April 12th.  "The White Ghost of Disaster" was hailed as eerily prophetic, about a giant ocean liner with a thousand souls aboard that strikes an iceberg.  Some newspapers even reprinted the story in its entirety.  The issue of The Popular (scanned by a fellow pulp scanner):

Cover by Hibberd Van Buren Kline.  The full issue and story readable at the Internet Archive here.

An excellent article in The Smithsonian Magazine explores the differences between the story and the Titanic's demise and brings up some further juicy possibilities about the Regatta Murders.  Peter's wife suggests on the stand that the affair was fabricated and that Thornton had vowed revenge when she turned down his own advances.  There's also the fact that it turns out Peter had fathered a child a year before the trial with the family maid.  

Sometime around 1914, there was a letter-writing campaign by those who'd figured out that Hains was being published as M.C. Garnett demanding that the pulp publishers cease publishing these stories.  In a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from September 27, 1914, Hains tells a reporter that he can no longer publish and is living aboard a boat with his wife and five kids living as a fisherman and driftwood gatherer.  Ironically, he's petitioning the police that he needs the right to bear his pistol to ward off gangs but that he is "not a gun-toter" and does not "believe in guns."  Wild stuff.

But, indeed, he must have made his living by some other means than his typewriter for a number of years, as he doesn't show up back in print until 1922 in Street & Smith's Sea Stories  (the first issue, no less). However, that story is a reprint of earlier Popular work as are some of his other stories, so figuring just when he was able to submit new stories to the pulps might take some further discerning.  In any case, an unexpected jaunt into pulp author biography here - I'll definitely take notice when I see stories from Jenkins (or Garnett) in the future.

But back to our 10-Story Book and who's the savage, anyways, if not our lead author?

A rather soulful and distinguished looking islander? The magazine's caption would josh you that he's a cannibal (tongue-in-cheek as the assertion may be):

Are these Brazilians savage?  A curiosity to the Chicagoan reader, at least, maybe it's the 10-Story Book readers that have gone native -

This being Prohibition, you know there's a longing for a little jungle juice.  A modern Paul Revere (cartoon by Preston Moses):

A splash page from the wife of the editor, Hazel Goodwin Keeler, for Halcyon (my favorite story in the issue) in which love conquers any culture clash:

 Image at Flickr

All this high art doesn't pay the rent, though, what type of advertisers might frequent a mag such as this? 

Girl pictures.  Rehab self-help. Loaded dice. Body image issues. Sexual insecurities.  Not much different than the ads during football today :D  Who are the savages anyways, eh? I need some of those loaded dice for my next craps game.  I'll catch all you magazine loving cannibals next time.

Wild West Weekly, December 26 1936 / Paul Powers, Pulp Writer

 

Cover image at Flickr.

 Wild West Weekly v107 n04 (1936-12-26.Street & Smith) (missing pages) (Darwin).cbr

Full scan here. Or you can read it at the Internet Archive and download alternate formats here.

Howdy, pardners.  It's been a while.  And here I am with a late Christmas present, consider it one of those parcels that didn't quite make it your doorstep by the big day. It's a present not only from yours truly but from the good people at pulpscans, as this book is part of one of the *many* group buys we've put together there where members throw in a little cash to buy books that the scanners digitize for posterity, community radio, yo.  For pulp lovers without a collection and who can't scan, contributing to these buys is a perfect way to do your part in preserving pulp.

The artist here is the most excellent Robert G. Harris, who began his career in mostly western pulps and who later "graduated" to the slicks working in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Liberty, and The Saturday Evening Post.  I've worked the cover image from what I assume to be the artist's copy of the proof that sold along with the original painting back in 2020.

Though my parcel is arriving late, I've got to credit the first story in this issue for first giving this old grinch the first glimpse of the Christmas Spirit this year, always desperately needed, as I hate crowds, commerce, and a whole month of Christmas tunes -humbug! :D.  

Credited to Ward M. Stevens, the story is written by Paul Powers, a stalwart of Wild West Weekly in the 30s, featuring his outlaw with a heart of gold, Sonny Tabor.

Illustration likely by Lorence Bjorkland.

The Tabor stories are in the tradition of Billy the Kid in a way, usually set in ranges of Arizona with Tabor as a beloved outlaw. But Sonny is no Billy (who'd backshoot you in a second). He has a heart of gold, and his efforts to do good are what propels the story even as the law invariably closes in behind.  I don't want to give any specifics of the story away (read it! read the other stories, too!), but I'll just say I found it very sweet and only had to suspend disbelief just a wee bit here and there :D I can't recall if I've written about pulp westerns here before or not, but I'll just say I thoroughly recommend their reading.  There's so many sub-genres in any given issue that keep it interesting - from the historical to the mythical to the comedic to straight blood and thunder.  Is it the nuanced modern Western we might be used to or the anti-hero of Clint Eastwood type? Not too often, but there's more poetry than you might imagine, and they're incredibly fun to read (all those millions upon millions upon millions of magazines sold, one dime after another - the people were pleased).  I've scanned a a couple of other 3W issues in recent weeks (one includes a story from another Powers' other well-known hero, Kid Wolf) which you can get to by clicking the link to my Internet Archive shelf (still slowly populating it with older scans) at the right.  But right now I want to pivot to a short book review, as I've read (or actually re-read) this tome since reading Law Guns:

I can't recall where I bought the book (though I do have a signed copy), but it is still in stock in places and leave it you to find at the bookseller of your choice if you're interested.  This is a most excellent pulp writer's memoir, a different individual experience but just as informative as Frank Gruber's Pulp Jungle, the most oft-cited example of the form.  

Powers is a fellow Kansan, from where us conceited easterners would call Western Kansas, a town I had to look up, though I've no doubt driven through the vicinity, Little River, Kansas, north of Hutchinson (my wife's hometown) and between McPherson and Lyons.  Those of us from Kansas know a catalog of small and tiny towns, but I wasn't familiar with this one :D 

The book follows his granddaughter Laurie's journey in learning about the world of pulp and Paul's life and work and includes his memoir from 1943 which is probably fair to assess as near the end of the successful portion of his career in the pulps which mirrored the success and downturn of the western titles of his main employer, Street & Smith.  Powers ponders his childhood as the son of successful doctor, who he seems to have always remained in the shadow of in his own mind at least, who was poor student with middling ambition.  Along the way, Powers does discover that he wants to be a magazine writer, very much so, and sets about it haphazardly starting as a joke or gag writer for magazines like Judge or Life and lesser magazines at a dollar or few a joke.  There was no instruction manual for breaking into the pulps (and I suspect Pulp Writer is meant to be as such) and he meets rejection slip after rejection slip as he's married and has his first child.  Forced into working in the salt mines (yep, we've got plenty of salt mines in Kansas) for subsistence, Powers is seemingly saved by the acceptance of his first story for Weird Tales, Monsters of the Pit, which would grace the cover in June of 1925.

 

Cover by Andrew Brosnatch.  What a funky phenomenon this cover is.  Heritage calls it classic, and it is indeed iconic in a fashion (like his cover for The Wicked Flea issue), but I daresay it's a bit primitive or even hideous :D

Powers would sell more stories to Weird Tales (half-cent payment up printing, if I recall correctly), a story to Action Stories, a story to 10-Story Book (an issue I happen to have and will add to the scan pile), but only really struck constant work in the fiction department (prior most of his earnings had come from joke sales) when he sold to editor Ronald Oliphant at Wild West Weekly in late 1928.  Once he figured out what Oliphant wanted exactly in stories for the magazine, he was able to sell as much as he could write (which was a lot).  Spurred by his success (and very high income for the day, including during the depths of the depression), Powers and his second wife were able to pick up and move as the whim hit (and it hit Powers often), exploring the locales that he'd use as fuel for his stories. Powers gives a great explanation as to what the pulps were and has a simultaneous pride in the fact that he was able to please so many mixed with the notion he might be doing more with his talent in terms of depth and poetry, a feeling common to many a commercial artist.  Alas, the demon rum might have kept Powers from a longer career, and he spent his later decades as a bookseller/book picker living a shell of his former life.  

But, you know, these hundreds of stories he left behind remain good reading, and the arc of an artist's private life doesn't diminish the goldmine of works they leave behind.

Anyways, an excellent memoir by Paul and an excellent examination by Laurie.  Her next book on pulp, on Love Story editor Daisy Bacon, which I'm sure to write about someday is - well - let's just say for now I consider it one of best books on pulp ever written, and Pulp Writer is a worthy warm-up.

One last excerpt from the 1936 Wild West Weekly Christmas edition, a heart-warming poem of yore, Santa Claus Stops A Lynchin' by Arthur R. Rafter:

 

Back sooner than later, pardners, so many pulps and mags to get to as well as some long-standing subjects...

Pulp Review: As a Sealed Book - Five Mysteries from the Pulp Era by Beulah Poynter

 

As a Sealed Book: Five Mysteries from the Pulp Era by Beulah Poynter, edited and published by Lucynka Staron, 2024.  Cover illustrations from “Hap” Hadley.  Here’s a book I picked up as soon as I saw it was out, from editor Lucynka Styron, a fellow blogger on pulp who had come to me looking for some scans of Poynter stories from the girlie pulps while she was researching this volume.  I’ve corresponded with Lucynka on various subjects in the romance pulps, and I daresay she’s sharp as a tack when it comes to the magazines, editors, authors and artists in the genre.  Her blog, with the very casual title Lucynka Review Obscure Bullshit can be found at lucynka.wordpress.com and is full of fun yet informative reviews of various pulp stories and authors.   Looking just now, I see her latest review is of a  Robert Leslie Bellem story in a 1932 issue of Love Story Magazine which sounds quite fun.  Besides story reviews, Lucynka also shares author and artist biographies, period newspaper articles, and other fun takes on the pulp era.


The one story I’d previously read by Poynter, Let’s Swap Wives, from Pep Stories in November 1928, is an odd story to say the least.  It's a bit of “swampsloitation” (full of redneck/hillbilly tropes and some wild sexual politics), so I didn’t know what to expect picking up this book of mysteries which are all gathered from Frank Toussey’s Mystery Magazine between 1918 and 1924.  Pulp-wise, Poynter in this period also appeared in "the trio" of The Parisienne, Saucy Stories, and Black Mask as well pulps like Breezy Stories and Snappy Stories and would later appear in Dell’s Cupid’s Diary and Sweetheart Stories, the occasional girlie pulp, in many later appearances in Munsey’s All-Story, as well as scattered appearances in the detective pulps.

Beulah Poynter has a nice Wikipedia page here.  A quick biographical sketch is that she was born to a hotel-keeping family north of Kansas City.  She had some schooling and was an avid reader, and at the age of 16 she ran off to join the theater.  She wrote and starred in her own plays and married a series of husbands that were entwined with her life as an actress.  As she got older and less the leading lady, she focused more on her writing and wrote a good number of romances from the late 20s into the 30s as well as a couple of later works.  There’s a brief biography at the beginning of the book, largely focusing on Poynter’s childhood experiences and dreams of the stage.

 

Beulah Poynter

 

The editor of As a Sealed Book places the stories within the context of “the golden age of detection” which seems accurate, and none of them would be out of place in, say, an early issue of Black Mask.  There’s disguises and mistaken identities, different classes and nationalities coming into contact and conflict with each other each with their varied manners and mannerisms, clues doled out parsimoniously and purposefully by the author, and tidy and just conclusions to each story.  I’ll give a short teaser on each story as to skip giving away any key plot details.

 

“Who Was Guilty?,” one of the two longer pieces in the collection, from Mystery Magazine December 15 1918.  The story opens with a minister pronouncing John Clay and the beautiful young Doris Davidger man and wife at a lavish country estate wedding.  The bride’s mother seems anxious, and we immediately meet Mark Clevering, the family lawyer who has been in love with Doris since boyhood and is none too pleased that she’s married dark and swarthy John Clay.  John Clay is in great spirits after the ceremony and leaves the guests to prepare for his honeymoon.  Doris’ mother seemed uncomfortable during the wedding and out of sorts, and Clevering confronts Doris after the wedding wishing her happiness but making his feelings of being jilted known. Upset, she follows Clay upstairs.  A shot rings out and a scream.  The mother faints at the bottom of the stairs, and the guests are gathered about Clay’s door. He’s been shot dead, and Doris is standing over him with blood on her dress.  Clevering tells the guests they are not to leave, and soon the police inspector arrives to look over the crime scene and interrogate the witnesses.  An interesting dynamic emerges pretty quickly in that Clevering has loyalty to Doris and the mother and Mr. Davidger who is also his client and nervously listens to the inspectors questions that seek to determine any motives the family might have.   Doris’ mother fainting continues, and Mr. Davidger asks Clevering to stay the night and watch over the family.   Staying so close to the murder scene, Clevering is privy to the footsteps and midnight creeping by a number of the servants that night, and complicated histories and secrets are revealed about the family, the help, and the deceased.  A solid whodunnit, aided by the fact that the deceased was quite the villain with past ties to various maids about the estate.


“Law-Maker and Law-Breaker,” the second novel in the collection, from Mystery Magazine February 15 1919.  This one opens in a tense scene as Adam Kent smokes a cigarette in the darkness alert to the fact that someone is stealthily working at the door trying to sneak in to his luxury hotel apartment while his family as out at the theater.  A boyish figure darts into the room, and the man quickly catches the small thief and turns on the light.  It’s a girl!  The slang-slinging thief, young Janie, quickly reveals that she’s not there to steal but actually to return a bag of gems, “sparklers,” that had been stolen from the Kents in a rash of robberies in the apartments. She tells Adam Kent the story of how the jewels came in to her possession and of how her mother had recently died and she’d been left in the care of a cruel step-father, and the rest of the family comes back home just as the police are called.  The inspector is suspicious of Jane, but the family has taken quite the liking to her including Kent’s son who is a junior partner in his law firm who takes a romantic interest.  Jane is chill with cold and nervousness and ends ups staying with the family as she recoups growing quite comfortable in the luxurious apartment that’s far from her own upbringing.  Mr. Kent quickly and without much explanation sours on Janie being there and tells her she needs to take the generous reward for the return of the jewels (which her step-father had been keeping for the actual thief) and leave the family forever.  With the reward for the jewels, Janie’s station in life should greatly change, but will her stepfather let her go?  And what of the blossoming romance between Janie and Kent’s son?  Janie’s past is more complicated than she knows, as is the Kent’s, and what unfolds is mixed up fates and fortunes and the effects of the sins of the fathers.  A meeting of high class and low class where nothing is quite what it seems.  My favorite story in the book.


“Trapping the Jewel Smugglers,” from Mystery Magazine June 15 1922.  An importer of musical instruments visits a detective agency with the suspicion that jewel thieves have been smuggling jewels into the country with his purchases of European instruments.  The agency sends their best man, a woman, Leslie Kelvin, to solve the mystery.  Suspicions falls on the importer’s purchaser, but there are plenty of other suspects about, too, and  operator Kelvin might just find a bit of romance along the way.  A curious peek at the business of importing musical instruments that seems to promise further tales of Leslie Kelvin, detective.  A fun story.


“The Argentine Ruby,” from Mystery Magazine December 15 1923.  A wealthy and cash-strapped Argentinian seeks a short-term loan from a rheumatic banker who is to hold a valuable ruby until the loan is paid back.  Time is of the essence, and the transaction needs occur at the banker’s estate.  Young Ramsey is brought in as bodyguard to insure the transaction proceeds smoothly.   The banker is to write the Argentinian a personal check to be cashed with special permission before the bank opens in the morning, and the ruby is to stay in the banker’s safe until it can be moved somewhere more secure.   What could go wrong?


“At Two A.M.,” from Mystery Magazine August 1 1924.  A detective firm is hired by a building superintendent who suspects a string of robberies in the building is an inside job and not the work of a local gang as the police suspect.  Strangely, the theft of an expensive set of emeralds from one of the wealthier inhabitants was glossed over and never reported to the police  The firm sends Wanda Alden, a top operative, to pose as a lodger and get to the bottom of the robberies.  We meet a number of residents and workers at the hotel, some who are not what they seem.  Late night mystery involving an empty apartment, a dumbwaiter, and finally the robbery of an entire month’s rent from the safe of the superintendent bring the caper to a head.
 

Overall, I’d give this collection a 7/10.  Poynter’s settings and plots are full of interest, and she’s good at parsing out the breadcrumbs.   Most interesting is the very diverse cast of characters from every part of the globe and every station of society.  Poynter is very democratic in that rich and poor alike are equally likely to be virtuous or deceitful, and this adds to the mystery in that villains might just be those held in highest esteem by society, and the most honest might be those with the most to gain from foul play.  Some of the slang or accents she uses can be a bit forced, but it does spice up the dialogue and add to the flavor of the characters.  She’s definitely a writer I’ll watch out for, and I’m curious to read her in 30s and 40s pulp romance mode or her 1952 paperback in what appears to be a different mode, White Trash.

Sport Story Magazine March 1, 1939

 

at Flickr

Download the full scan here. 

Or read online or download in .pdf format from my Internet Archive shelf here.

The cover to this issue by Modest Stein was featured on the 2023's edition of The Pulpster in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first issue of Sport Story Magazine.  It's far from my favorite Stein but does possess a kinetic energy and celebration of sport.   Michelle Nolan has pointed to this issue as the only sport pulp to feature women on the cover.   In Warming the Bench, the editor (I'm not sure who it was at the time) writes about having Jackson Scholz visiting his office and admiring Stein's painting which would become the cover for the issue.  He asks Scholz (three time Olympian and ultra-frequent contributor to the magazine with three stories in this issue alone) if he can come up with a story for the painting.  No problem, boss.

I've read this one before posting (fittingly in a fun week of sports including the first game of the NBA Finals as well as some great NCAA softball and baseball) and will give a quick teaser on these.  I do like synopses and reviews but don't want to spoil the fun.

Hoop Lesson - the cover story by Scholz - Carl Temple has taken a job with Grayson Tire perhaps a prize for the fact his grandfather owns a large share of stock in the company.  Shown the company gymnasium (and corporate teams are often the setting of sports pulp stories, a facet of athletic life that's largely receded in American life), Carl has an adverse reaction to the fact women are on the court.  As fate would have it, one of the women players is the daughter of the company President and has recommended Carl, a former college Center, be recruited for the company team.  Done with basketball, Carl nonetheless is cajoled into taking a back-up spot and is even roped into chaperoning the women's team on a trip out of town.  Can Carl get his basketball groove back and make peace with the fact women have hoop dreams, too?  Can he find his footing on the court and keep his feet out of his mouth?  An excellent sport story and maybe a bit of romance, Scholz writes a good lead story here with the type of inspiration one might expect of the genre, even if the source might be a twist.  The call of the action on the court might leave a little to be desired but in an era when a final score might be 22-21, I imagine the game was indeed very different than today.

Iron Chin begins with a young rube making the error of bending down behind a donkey and taking a hoof to the jaw.  Amazingly the lad remains still standing, but lodgers happen to witness the event, one being a former light heavyweight in the fight game.  Does an iron chin a boxer make?  Our rube will find out as he's tricked into a match far beyond his skill.  How I do love boxing tales.   

Illustration by Frank Kramer who did most if not all of the art for the interior. At Flickr

Ben Peter Freeman who wrote a great number of novels for Dell's Five-Novels Monthly writes Ten-Grand Set.  Playboy Dusty Dean takes the game none-to-seriously giving in when the game gets tough.  A tough-minded uncle holds back his inheritance, though, forcing Dean to grind it out on the low end of the pro circuit.  Things take a turn, though, when a top pro does his pal dirty.  Can Dusty Dean get his act together and win the (Twenty) Grand Set? A fun story.  Freeman is best remembered as a writer on TV's Adventures of Superman.

 at Flickr

Six Girls and a Basket by  Handley Cross - Cross must have been some sort of sports writer, as he handles this article on the rise of women's hoops as well as the later sections on Big Moments in Sport (running down a couple of big games from the last season in various sports) and Trainer and Coach (advice for athletes getting in shape for the Spring Season).  Here Cross gives the lowdown on women's basketball c.1939 citing such authorities as James Naismith and Phog Allen and describes an epic game between Wichita and Little Rock as well as variations between the men's and women's rules.  Having Six women per side seems to be the most shocking difference in rules, but odder than that might be the fact each player was allowed a single dribble.  Cross easily seems the worst writer in the issue, so perhaps it's best he's confined to the non-fiction areas of the magazine.  In the Trainer and Coach department, regarding cigarettes and athletics, Handley writes, "Smoking?  Well that depends. If you are a runner, you had better stop altogether.  But baseball players and many other athletes seem to be able to smoke moderately without it doing them any harm.  If you continue smoking, make certain that your smoking is moderate."  Lucky Strike advertises on the back cover of this sports magazine and no wonder my high school still had a smoking section in the early 90s :D

Telemark Tension by Leonard Lupton, longtime practitioner in the sport genre with a mystery tale involving the Ski Jump and shots fired mid-flight. I think this might be the first Ski Jump tale I've ever come across...

Home-Town Hero by Leslie McFarlane, writer in many genres and described by Fictionmags as "Newspaperman; prolific hack; also author of “Hardy Boys” stories under name of Franklin W. Dixon."  The story of loutish Skates Kelsey, washed up hockey player, gambler, drunkard, and scout for the Chiefs who finds himself fired and penniless at story's outset.  Luckily for him, he gets a tip about a local hockey prospect that Skates intends to use for at the very least train fare back to the big city.  A rewarding tale of devious and loutish behavior, small town pride, and competing interests on ice.

.400 Eaters by Royal Hall, pseudonym of Scholz, but this time in a humorous vein.  My favorite story in the issue regarding a baseball team that's gotten fat and lazy and put on a no-lunch diet by a coach that has seen it all.  Called up to aid the struggling team is a lanky player from AA with a huge head with sunken cheeks and gargantuan feet that match his enormous appetite.  The rookie puts coach's dietary regimen to the test and hilarity ensues.  Any coach that's gotten a bit of wicked glee hitting fungo to lazy players is going to get a kick out of this one.

Seal-Skinned by Jack Volney, another pseudonym of Scholz, regards a water polo team for a feed manufacturer.  Sadly, when a team member goes to collect payment for goods rendered to a visiting circus, he receives payment in the form of trained seal.  All the horses were taken.  The seal becomes the team mascot, but can they keep him out of the water? 

A uniformly excellent issue with only a low spot or two.  A nice mix of sports and story types as is usual for the sports pulps.  If you haven't read a sports pulp before, this might a good place to start.  If you must pick only a story or few my faves were 1) .400 Eaters 2) Home-Town Hero and 3) Ten-Grand Set.  The opener gets special mention, too, as a meditation on women's sports and the nature of mojo.  Exactly what inspires our hero to action might irk those of us with a feminist bent (me!), but maybe not...

Notes on the scan:  there's some variance in page color from page to page.  The edit matches the copy I scanned from, and, as mysterious as the coloration may be, I rolled with it - the color edit is uniform across all of the interior pages.  I did remove all the pencil from the crossword, "Skull Practice," just in case any cruciverbalists want to try their hand at an 80 year old sports puzzle.

One last image, the inner back cover, Lee Jeans and Ripley's Believe it or Not

at Flickr

The Early Follies of Cap'n Joey and Worth B. Carnahan / W.B.C. Pt. 7

at Flickr 

Get the cover to cover scan here. 

or you can view it online or grab a .pdf of the issue at the Internet Archive here.

Worth Carnahan, 1924.  The November edition of Burten's Follies, the Turkey number.  Perhaps Carnahan's first published magazine cover.  An appropriate way to start a post on Carnahan's earliest work in New York City, eh?  A deceptively layered cover with in the interplay of form and shadow.  And after Cap'n Joey Burten's heart, too, no doubt.  F is for flapper and F is for football, two of Burten's keenest interests. 

Based on the date of Carnahan's marriage to Genevieve discussed in the previous post and the fact that Carnahan says he worked in Connecticut for two years after before striking out for "the big time", that would put the Carnahan's arrival in The Big Apple around September of 1924 which just happens to be the same month he first appears in Burten's Follies, sounding his arrival to the magazine with a single illustration in the September issue of Follies.

An edited image via Will Straw, who has most kindly supplied me with a wealth of materials regarding Joey Burten for my investigation of Carnahan.  I've linked Will's pages before (and here is a fantastic page he's put up that has some great information on Burten as well a wonderful gallery of magazine covers).  Will has been working on a book on Stephen Clow (a notorious publisher in his own right and occasional contributor to Follies himself) which has material on Burten as well as other publishers in the Broadway/Scandal/Artists and Models milieu.

I've spent the last couple of days reading Burten's publication leading up to Carnahan's arrival, and it's been quite the trip.  Joey Burten (born Joseph G. Bernstein, I'm assuming he Americanized his name like so many others of that time to fit in) is an interesting character to say the least.  I haven't been able to find very much in the way of hard information outside of what other pulp scholars have written and even some of those bits of background seem iffy.  Born in New York in 1893, his brother was Morris Bernstein who was also in the publishing business and also on Statements of Ownership for Follies beginning in 1923. Burten had a lengthy football career in that he played for LSU starting in 1914 which would have had him starting his schooling at 21.  Burten described himself as a rolling stone, and if his constant tales of travel and ribaldry in his magazines are to be believed, it's no surprise he started school a bit late.  He played in 1915 and 1916 as well but then went off to World War I where he would make lieutenant in the Army.  Burten doesn't write about his war experiences in Follies often, and when he does he seems haunted by the experience (like most WWI veterans who had been through that meatgrinder). Burten returned to LSU for his last year of football eligibility in 1919, and would play up into his publishing career playing for the New York Giants in 1921 (different Giants than we know now) and the Rock Island Independents out of Illinois during the Fall season from 1923-1925. He's listed in the football records at 6'0" 205 lbs.  In the December 1923 issue of Follies, Burten writes, "Art Williams who is the whole show on sports in the Middle West printed that I was some 'plunging fullback.' In refutation, Art, let me tell you that I'm the best in the world when it comes to plunging my fork into a mess of potatoes, and I don't mean maybe."

It so happens that the only picture of Burten I've ever seen is in the issue I shared at the top of this post.  Here's Burten next to Jim Thorpe.  You think Beau (Jackson) knows, but Jim Thorpe is the most versatile athlete I've ever heard of, winning a a gold medal in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the 1912 Summer Olympics and then going on to play six seasons of Major League Baseball, play for six National Football League teams (as well as other pro football leagues), and even play on a traveling pro all Native American basketball team.  And that's not even getting into the All-Star/All-American/number of championship accomplishments or his career in college sports.  We've got some territory in common, as he spent some time at Haskell Indian College in my hometown of Lawrence, KS.  They still lift hard at the fitness center at Haskell named after the man 💪 I imagine Thorpe and Burten got on like gangbusters on the Rock Island Independents (and probably drank the rest of the team under the table, good lord.)

The mysterious Celestine Vichy provides caption.  Vichy is often referred to as an on again off again lover girl of Burten, though both Vichy and Burten seem to have plenty of amorous adventures on their own.  Vichy is described as a sporting woman herself, ready to hop in the ring with any woman that will put on a pair of gloves (or man for that matter).  And I better give a close-up crop of Burten here, too, just in case this really is the only picture that makes it to the internet of the guy.  Heaven forbid he goes down in perpetuity in a pulpy photograph wearing a goofy helmet and the letter 8, obscurity might be better ><

But I'd be selling Burten short if I were to categorize him only as a football player.  He's a joker, a traveler, a lover, and a poet.  He was a hustler with such a vivid imagination that it's incredibly hard for me to cipher out what's real and what's imagined in the yarns he spins in his magazines.   Here's this fullback living in Greenwich Village with all sorts of bohemian artists, poets, and free love types, hob-knobbing with the celebrities of the day but also apparently partaking in globe-trotting of the most adventurous variety.   His magazines contain many distinct editorial and poetic voices, and I've no doubt he had help with his magazines, but I also have to wonder how many of the pseudonymous contributors are figments and how many are real people.  Adding to the mystery in all this is that, in risque magazines, authors,artists, and editors deigned to give their real names because of the risk of obscenity blow back. Money men and distributors always had the smaller fish (like Burten) taking all the risk on the paperwork as figureheads so that they would be fall guys when decency groups managed to get somebody hauled off to court for obscenity.  Which is a little puzzling for the modern reader, because it is very hard to recognize these charming little magazines as smut.

I didn't really mean to get into all these details regarding Burten, but I don't think I can set the stage for Carnahan's entry without looking at the nature of the mag and the couple of years that came before he arrived.  Cap'n Joey's Jazza Ka Jazza (which would turn into Cap'n Joey's Follies then Follies then Burten's Follies) started as a Greenwich village version of the folk humor that made Capt. Billy's Whiz-Bang a success out of Minnesota.  It started out very simplistic in terms of graphics. Bruce Long has scanned a couple of the early issues which are available at the Internet Archive, a *fantastic* contribution, and the image below is from his scan of the second issue:

 

 

"Jule," 1922.  Or here's the cover of the following issue courtesy Will Straw.

 

I suspect "Jule" here as well.  I do think the graphics are very striking in their simple wildness, and I love the colored cover stock.

After a single wrap of photos, Joey opens issue number two touting the success of the first issue and alluding to his Greenwich Village den.  The copyright registration card for the second issue lists Burten's residence as 39 7th Street in the village (and I do get a kick out of Google streetviewing these addresses, perhaps Joey lived above the space that is now a Subway).

 

How appropriate is the quotation from the NYT here as celebration of Rabelaisian comedy. Even the most star-aspiring amongst us are motivated by the same Darwinian drives shared by the lowest primate - the juxtaposition of the two makes for great comedy and the art of the 20s mined that vein in art high and low.

 

The following page:

 

 

By the fourth issue, Burten is upping his game in terms of graphic and production quality.  One hallmark of the 20s magazine market was that it was ever-changing and quickly.   Magazines like the Whiz-Bang or Cap'n Joey's learned that the public wanted not only people's humor but photos, illustration, and novelty.  The magazines that were initially produced for a nickel and sold for a quarter needed to up their game if they were to stand out from the newsstand competition.  From the slick section at the center of issue four printed in green ink, an account of Joey, the mysterious Celestine, and circulation-manager Rozatski attendance at the Quat'z Arts Ball at Tammany Hall after the Parisian tradition:

 

 

Subject unknown, Celestine Vichy?  Hard to know, the subject of artist's model is a constant topic of ribaldry in the era (and, indeed, I refer to a whole genre of magazine as artists and models mag - someday I'll get hot and heavy into that maze of publications of which later incarnations of this very mag were a part).  The copyright registration card for this issue lists Burten's address as 44 Greenwich Ave (Perhaps his den was above what is now the Greenwich Treehouse and Partners & Crime Mystery Booksellers).  By the sixth issue, Jo Burten is still the copyright claimant, but the publisher and printer is listed in the copyright registration as Bohemian Mag. Co., Inc, the namesake of the "Bohemian Group" of magazines of which Worth Carnahan would be engraver and art director for almost immediately upon his arrival on the scene.  There are *many* other players within the magazines and behind the scenes in the printing and distribution aspects of this group that played key parts in the magazine history of the first half of the 20th century.  

For the second volume which would appear quarterly starting with the Pre-Spring Number in 1923, the magazine title pivots from  Cap'n Joey's Jazza Ka Jazza to Cap'n Joey's Follies (after the various Follies of Broadway no doubt) and the format switched from humor digest to a full magazine size on a slicker variety of paper.  Not high-end by any means but aspirational with color covers, more space for higher quality advertisements (though still mostly local clients), much more spot and full page illustration, photos all over the place and an increasing number of contributors art-wise and article-wise, whereas previously you get the feeling Joey was doing most of the penmanship himself.  Necessary because Joey was a traveling man?  Investors come aboard because of the obvious opportunity the Jazza Ka Jazza's success provided?  An increasingly competitive magazine environment that demanded novelty at every turn? I'd say so.  The first cover of the second volume, courtesy of Will Straw's page on Burten:

Starting with this issue and running through the first five issues of the volume, Burten is listed as Travelling Editor while the Assistant Editor is ostensibly a Jeff Jiggs. During this year, Burten spins tales of trips to visit rum runners in the Bahamas, adventures in the wild oil boom towns of Oklahoma, as well as happenings in various town in the rust belt (assuming these last travels were during football season). Starting with this issue, the address for the Bohemian Mag. Co. is listed at 1416 Broadway, in the heart of Tin Pan Alley, and, indeed, there seems to be many ties between Burten and the song printers and publishers of Broadway.  New contributors like Albert Vargas, Harry Glynn, and Merle Hersey, and Dan Baker would make contributions.  Beginning with the May 1924 edition, Wayne Sabbath would be listed as Assistant Editor, a name that would be linked to Burten for much of his later career.  The art was getting better and better, partly because of "borrowing" of foreign material from France's La Vie Pariesienne and the UK cartoons of Starr Wood, but also with the addition of American artists like Chas. A. Smith, Millard Hopper, and Phil Love.  Also, the photography improves, as credited photos from John de Mirjian start to appear. And then our man, Carnahan comes on the scene.

 

At this point, I'm going to kind of drift off here from a sequential history of Burten's Follies and just get into sharing issues and Worth Carnahan pieces. When exactly Carnahan becomes the art editor isn't clear, but I'd say pretty fast.  I have a feeling his engraving experience was a great boon to the enterprise along with the layout skills, and starting with the cover that opened this the post, Carnahan is given the cover for the next seven issues (between Burten's Follies and Follies Quarterly), always a sign of publisher's favor (not to mention strong sales).

 

But Carnahan's first credit begins with this issue from the month before the issue I led this article with.  The issue is an old scan of mine October 1924 issue of Follies (from before I had a proper interest in Carnahan) and was edited by my long lost pal, McCoy.

 

at Flickr.

Cover to cover scan available here.

Online viewing and .pdf available at the IA here.

 

"The People Be Tickled," and I imagine Carnahan was pleased to see his name in print amongst the contributors on the frontispiece:

 

Artist unknown, possibly Wayne Sabbath, as W.S. signed below a variation of the same frontispiece in the next issue.  Also unknown is why Worth Carnahan is credited as R. Carnahan in a number of these contributors lists, but there is plenty of funny business going on with other names in these as well.

 

Here's Carnahan using one of his many signatures, simply a C (which he had a number of variations on).  I suspect the illustration may be an adaptation from La Vie Parisienne:

 

Or here's one made up of a series of small figures, a common sighting in the artists and models magazine and girlie pulps, as you might be able to squeeze a little lass in many a spot on these pages.  The signature has a W, B, and C, cramped into one spot, he hadn't come up with his distinctive "bug" signature yet that combined his initials in a stamp-like configuration.

One more illustration from the issue, not from Carnahan but a self-portrait by Burten himself, caveman indeed.  If I'm including a photo of him looking goofy in the old-school football helmet, I might as well give another option in the portraiture department, heh heh

More Worth Carnahan, from the following month's issue linked at the top of the post.  Already in just the third issue he's appeared in for Burten, Carnahan has the cover spot as well as a couple of feature illustrations.  The Leg of Nations:

at Flickr. I like his signature on that one.

I particularly enjoy this one, impressions of a newcomer to the Playboy's Frolic:

 

at Flickr.

 

and some fun spot illustrations (which are fairly small on a three column page) from the issue...

The Turkey Number.  Meditating on a turkey?  Quite the bird.

 

 There's a zen to these.

One last cartoon from Carnahan for this post.

 

 

I've got more W.B.C. Follies material share and ruminations on the evolution of the magazine but think looking at the first three issues of Carnahan appearances is a nice stopping point.  I'd stress that though I'm focusing on a single artist in a some of these Carnahan posts I'll be doing that there is all sorts of neat material in these issues, go ahead and thumb through 'em and see what there is to see :)

I'm feeling happy about the trajectory of my Carnahan project here and realize there's still so much ahead to get to.  Still, I'm gonna be mixing up the subject matter here in a couple of posts going forward.  I've been scanning so many neat magazines and have so many ongoing and newfound investigations.  Like this rooster, I believe the next couple posts will be on some recent discoveries, and I'll write about some new subjects while I do some further edits behind the scenes regarding Mr. Carnahan.  (From the first issue of Frank Armer's Whoopee! April 1929):