Magazine Review: High Adventure #200: Special Last Issue edited by John P. Gunnison
Much like the pulp magazines it reprints, HIgh Adventure is at last coming to the end of its publication history. But a 200 issue run over 33 years (starting as Pulp Review) is pretty darn impressive. And to celebrate the occasion, this is a double-size issue with fourteen stories, and images of all the previous covers. The limited-edition hardback version even has color images! There’s a brief introduction which goes into that publication history.
“The Lady on the Stairs” by Agatha Christie starts us off with one of her Hercule Poirot tales. This is part of the “Big Four” sequence where the Belgian sleuth battles an international crime syndicate. This time he and sidekick Captain Hastings investigate the disappearance of a British physicist in Paris. The gendarmes have been baffled for two months, but Poirot solves it in an afternoon.
Notably, the story includes a character who’s basically Marie Curie and may or may not be one of the Big Four. If this taste intrigues you, Christie later edited these stories into a novel, The Big Four.
“Spirit of the West” by William Dudley Pelley is set in the “modern” West of 1915. A cowboy, a small rancher and the sheriff make a bet on whether the West has become tame and void of adventure and set a week to see which one has the most exciting event happen to them. Sure enough, the spirit of the Wild West is not entirely dead.
“Billy Du Mont, Reporter” by Rex Stout is a rare romance story from his early pulp career before he came up with Nero Wolfe. A young man wangles a reporter job from his father, only to discover that his first assignment is very personal to him. It’s slight, and it’s a good thing Mr. Stout switched to mystery writing.
“Murdered” by Margie Harris stars her series character, private eye Beth Moore. She gets involved when a meteorologist who was a friend of her father’s gets murdered at the weather bureau. Beth is tough as nails, but plays pretty fast and loose, concealing evidence from the police and arranging for suspects to be drugged so she can perform an illegal search. It’s also not a fair play mystery, as a couple of clues are discovered offstage and only revealed at the summation.
“Pop Brennan, Rookie” by George Bruce is a baseball story. A scout is sent to Oklahoma to recruit a promising hitter, only to be undercut by a sneakier recruiter. His one chance at a recovery is the title character, a pitcher with a large family. This one is told in Damon Runyonesque dialect with plenty of sports slang and humorous exaggeration. If you like that sort of thing in small doses, as I do, this is a fun story.
“Sky Crusaders” by Edwin C. Parsons is a reminisce of his time with a famous chase pilot of World War One, Raoul Lufbery, a member of the Lafayette Escadrille. Check out his Wikipedia article, which covers most of the same ground here.
“The White Goddess of Kmer” by Arthur J. Burks is jungle adventure somewhere near modern Thailand. An expedition is looking for the last remnants of the “Kmer” and their fabulous treasure and are slowly dying off. It turns out that this lost tribe is not the historical Khmer people, but a small group of powerful and good-looking “white” people who practice human sacrifice and have been holding out in their remote area by killing everyone who wanders in,
Naturally, their high priestess is hankering for some good lovin’ from an outsider, and at the end she’s the only known survivor of her tribe as the surrounding natives discover their neighbors are actually mortals. She is remarkably okay with this.
“Waterfront Fists” by Robert E. Howard stars Steve Costigan, sailor and boxer. This time he’s in Honolulu, but being somewhat distracted from his upcoming match by a beautiful girl who has an evolving sob story. Good thing he has such a thick skull! The boxing sequence is brutal, but the overall story is funny.
“Blonde Bait for the Murder Master” by John D. MacDonald is the story of an ex-cop turned numbers racket stooge who’s in on a plan to double-cross his boss and set up an independent racket. Love that title. And the story is genuinely suspenseful, one of my favorites in this issue.
“Dynamite Has Its Advantages” by Dale Brown is a Western romance. A young woman is trying to buy back her ranch, but there’s a series of small “accidents” eating up her savings, and it sure is suspicious how that keeps happening. Can a vacationing circus performer help her figure out what’s going on, or at least win her heart?
“The Lost Boat Survivor” by T. Jenkins Hains is sea adventure. Three survivors of shipwreck are stranded on a South Atlantic desert island. One day a mysterious small boat washes up, but will it be enough to get them to the nearby larger island? Meanwhile, some whalers lose a boat, but have to give up the search because they’re low on supplies. The story keeps going well after you’d expect with a subplot about buried treasure.
“North of the Stars” by John Paul Jones is air adventure. A pilot who’s let himself slide into a drunken bum becomes essential to a plan to rob Alaskan gold miners by way of seaplane and balloons. Meanwhile, the mining camp has a young woman who’s accompanying her father who has a dark secret regarding what actually happened to her mother.
Astra’s a pretty spunky heroine, and actually gets to throw fists a few times. But when evil gambler Stronk figures out that she will do this, he’s careful not to fight fair. Pilot Kay supposedly became a drunk because he was unlucky in love, but he’s also got a bad case of PTSD,
“She Was Romanced by Galahad” by Michael Hall is a short “spicy” romance about a fellow stranded in the boonies of Argentina who meets the sultry daughter of the local governor and gets it on with her. This one has female toplessness in an illustration, and strongly implies the characters had sex. Good thing they’re getting married soon!
“Rough on ‘Rats'” by Anatole Feldman ends this issue with a gangster story from the short period where gangster pulps depicted criminals as the protagonists without bothering to make sure that crime did not pay at the end. The three biggest mobs in New York City during Prohibition are being pushed towards open warfare. Someone is feeding the Irish, Jewish and Chinese gangs the same info and then tipping off the Feds, resulting in gunfights and crossfire.
The gang leaders are hopeless at spotting the “rat” that’s double-crossing everyone, and the Prohibition agents are corrupt, so it’s up to gun moll Sadie, sister of one leader and mistress of another, to track down the traitors. This one is pretty heavy on the ethnic slurs and features torture, but in the end is a truly American story of people from different backgrounds coming together to defeat a common enemy.
Content note: Many of these stories contain at least a little period racism and sexism. You know the drill.
It’s an interesting selection of stories with some variety, and a handful of famous authors, so makes a good sampler of pulp if you’ve been thinking of dipping your toe in. Many of the previous issues are still in stock on the Adventure House website if this whets your taste buds. (I’ve still got some back issues in my reread pile to review later.)
Farewell, High Adventure! You were a true comrade!
