Early 2023 I lucked into a large 1930s collection of the pulp Western Trails magazine. I featured many of the covers and spines from the haul in a blog early last year. Sadly, many of the issues have vast condition flaws. Missing covers, both front and/or rear. (Those lacking front covers were not featured in that blog entry). Missing spines. Chunks of covers lacking. Front covers present but glued down to the internal page or onto an inserted sheet of paper and itself glued to the next interior page. Some covers are trimmed. The collection was largely a blind, take-a-chance purchase. The ear ..read more

Creasey Mystery Magazine (v1 n4, November 1956) was published by Dalrow Publishing and unlike its preceding three issues, sports a full color illustrated cover. Edited by Leslie Syddall, this issue is mostly reprints by quality writers of the mystery genre. The artist signing as R.W.S. is Ronald W. Smethurst and he would be responsible for all of this publisher’s illustrated fiction magazine covers. Smethurst also illustrated some covers for WDL, aka, World Distributors. The lead novella is Murder Out of the Past by John Creasey. It debuted in an unknown South African magazine a few years bef ..read more

In 1952, English hardcover publisher Jarrolds published Margaret Archer’s Jonathan Guest. It is an historical romance, a vast break from her crime / detective novels. And depending upon one’s interpretation of the novel’s conclusion, one may even consider this to be a gothic romantic mystery, as Archer has infused numerous genres into this work. The dust jacket art features a handsome Englishman with a happy, smiling young redhead gazing up at the man she loves. The illustration is signed lower-right “Harman.” This would be Jack Harman, who illustrated many of the juvenile western novels in R ..read more

Chuck Stanley was one of many aliases used by Charles Stanley Strong. Born 29 November 1906 in Brooklyn, New York, Strong went on to become a global adventurer and fiction writer. A look at his inadequate Wikipedia entry would lead you to believe he almost entirely wrote juvenile fiction. There’s no real mention of his westerns, his pulp fiction output, etc. Several of his westerns were published by Crown or Arcadia, and in both cases, their copyrights were renewed by the publisher, not the author (who was dead decades earlier by then). Cherokee Fowler was originally published in the United St ..read more

In 1946, Pendulum Publications released Yard Lengths, a collection of five detective stories by Donald Shoubridge, the first issue in their short-lived Pendulum Popular Detective Series. The approximate paperback dimensions are 4.75 x 5.75 inches, and contains 120 pages. The cover art is not signed, but features a silhouetted man smoking a cigarette with a drawn gun in one hand. The title refers to Scotland Yard, naturally. The contents below include the pages each story spans. I was not able to trace each story’s original source of publication. (3-25) Murder of the Month (25-53) The Case of ..read more

Published August 1955 by Herbert Jenkins Ltd., Darker Grows the Street is the third novel in the Steve Craig crime thriller series. Bevis Winter returns for his third outing with his sarcastic private detective along with partner Patrick Shaun Mulligan (now aged 31) and office-girl Kitty Callaway. The novel spans pages 9 to 190; it is comprised of 13 colorfully titled chapters. The cover art is by the highly competent Kingsbury / London illustrator Henry Fox. Darker Grows the Street was later reprinted in 1964 via Digit Books in a mass market paperback edition. Darker Grows the Street by Bevis ..read more

I am actively searching for vintage books authored by Norman Firth written under a myriad of aliases. Many are noted below. This list is not complete, as there are publications I am not aware of. He appeared in obscure digest-sized magazines and digest-sized comic books, too. Please feel free to quote anything by this author. No hardcovers needed. Please contact me: morganwallace@gmail.com and send photos of the items you have to offer. as by N. Wesley Firth Desire at Midnight (Clifford Lewis; two editions exist) Frightened Virgin (Grant Hughes) Lady in Leicester Square (Brown Watson) Night S ..read more

Long ago I read two Hoyt Merion (one “r”) westerns and decided they were amusing enough to warrant reading some more, these published now as Hoyt Merrion (two “r”s). Given that the double “r” appears on all of the Wells Gardner Darton & Co paperbacks, I have to assume this was the correct spelling. What’s unclear to me is whether all of the HM titles were actually written by the same person or not. Hoyt is definitely a fake name. Was it an alias for one author, or, a house name created by the publisher? Were they penned by an Englishman or reprints of American pulp stories? Valley of Lost ..read more

The cover proclaims Phantom magazine to feature “true ghost stories” but does it? The editorial inside suggests that some of the stories claim to be true and some are fiction, but the editor decided not to clarify which was which, leaving that up to the reader to decide. This debut edition features no date, but inside an advert stating that the next issue would be out next month. That second issue sports a date of May 1957. That’s no guarantee that No. 1 appeared in April. It may have come out a month or two earlier. Undoubtedly UK fanzines discussed its appearance on the stands and I’d love ..read more

Orchid Lady was published by Hamilton & Co., circa 1948, and states inside the author is Sheila A. Firth. If you’ve been following this blog closely, that name might ring a distant bell, as I have blogged one other title by that name. SAF actually is the alias of N. Wesley Firth, a man who died young (aged 29) but managed to inexplicably churn out a massive amount of literature. His output has historically been decided by the quality of his science fiction stories. Nobody will dispute that his SF efforts are (and were) terribly dated rubbish. However, it is a crime to hold that against hi ..read more