Upcoming presentation on Carter Brown's work.

The State Library of New South Wales in Sydney announced the free online presentation "Cataloguing Carter Brown's Literary Legacy" on 3 Nov 2026 from 11A to noon local time (that would be 8P to 9P EST). The presenter will be Clara Sitbon, a senior lecturer in French and Francophone studies at the University of Sydney who specializes in crime fiction and has investigated the question of what Carter Brown (aka Alan Yates) actually wrote. Yates (1923–85), who emigrated from Britain to Australia, is often credited with writing more than 300 books and 75 novellas in genres such as mystery, western, science fiction, and horror. 

Lester Dent's maritime detectives.

Lester Dent. The Dux, Chillicothe
(MO) Business College yearbook,
1923, p. 106

Over on the Black Gate blog, Will Murray discusses fictional detectives created by pulp writer Lester Dent (1904–59) who investigated maritime matters: Oscar Sail and Cyrus Peace.

A 1980s interview with pulp figure Howard Browne.

Noah Beery Jr. (background) and James Garner (foreground) 
in "Sleight of Hand," The Rockford Files (1975)

I came across a post on radio station KPFA of a 1980s interview with sci-fi and mystery pulp author-editor-screenwriter Howard Browne (1908–99) conducted by author Richard A. Lupoff.  A collection of Browne's mysteries with PI Paul Pine is available from Haffner Press. Browne's screen credits include Banacek, Capone (film, 1975), The Fugitive, Kraft Suspense Theatre, Longstreet, Mannix, Mission: Impossible, and 77 Sunset Strip. His novel Thin Air (1954) was adapted three times: as an episode of Climax, as the episode "Sleight of Hand" for The Rockford Files, and as an episode of Simon & Simon.

My July-Aug 2024 EQMM column.

My column, The Jury Box, appears in the July/Aug 2024 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. In it, I review recent classic reprints and short story collections that offer elements atypical in mystery fiction (like the unreliable narrator). Authors covered are Joan Cockin (aka Edith Joan Burbidge Macintosh), Sebastian Farr (aka Eric Walter Blom), Lorenz Heller, Edward D. Hoch, R. M. Laurenson, Helen Nielsen, Isabel Ostrander, and Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements.

Online TCU exhibition on dime novels.

Texas Christian University's Mary Couts Burnett Library has the online exhibition "A Riotous Imagination; or, Dime Novels in America," which looks at the inexpensive and often lurid tales of adventure, mystery, horror, and romance that emerged in the nineteenth century. Sections of the exhibition include "Cowboys and Detectives," "Investigating Crime," and "Rise of the Pulps."

Gay pulp fiction exhibition, Emory University.

On view until October 7, 2022, at Emory University's Rose Library is the exhibition "Forbidden Loves and Secret Lusts: Selections from the Golden Age of Queer Pulp Fiction, which draws from the library's hundreds of such novels that were published from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Also, the library has added to its collection of Victorian yellowbacks.

Online exhibition, Teaching with Mass-Market Paperbacks.

The Phantom of the Opera by
Gaston Leroux, part of the
UNC Libraries exhibition

The UNC Libraries online exhibition "Teaching with Mass-Market Paperbacks" draws on the paperback collection of UNC Chapel Hill to assist instructors who wish to use such works in their classroom. Some sample lesson plans are provided. Mystery books include assorted works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; The Blue Geranium by Dolan Birkley (aka Dolores Hitchens); The Couch by Robert Bloch; Honeymoon in Hell by Fredric Brown; Cassidy's Girl by David Goodis; A Taste for Honey by H. F. Heard; I Married a Dead Man and other works by William Irish (aka Cornell Woolrich); and Sorry, Wrong Number by Allan Ullman and Lucille Fletcher (as the cover notes: "She Dialed .. D-E-A-T-H").

"Cowboys, Detectives, and Daredevils" exhibition.

"Rubout" by Allen
Anderson. New Britain
Museum of American Art

Running through August 7, 2022, is the exhibition "Cowboys, Detectives, and Daredevils" at the New Britain [CT] Museum of American Art that features art from pulp genres such as crime and detective, western, science fiction, adventure, and aviation.

Ray Bradbury's mystery fiction.

In the LA Review of Books, Cullen Gallagher reviews Killer, Come Back to Me, a new collection published by Hard Case Crime of Ray Bradbury's crime stories. Although Bradbury did not think much of his abilities as a mystery writer, Gallagher believes he was being too tough on himself.

Crime comics, LOC.

The Headlines & Heroes blog of the Library of Congress highlights crime comics.

Deadline approaches for Clues issue on interwar mysteries.

A reminder that the manuscript submission deadline for the Clues: A Journal of Detection issue "Interwar Mysteries: The Golden Age and Beyond" is October 12. The issue is guest edited by Victoria Stewart (University of Leicester). Manuscripts may be submitted to Janice M. Allan, Clues executive editor.

The fictional detective that inspired Isaac Bashevis Singer.

In the fall 2018 issue of PaknTreger of the Yiddish Book Center, David Mazower, Elissa Sperling, and Michael Yashinsky discuss Yoyne (Jonas) Kreppel's Max Spitzkopf—the "Viennese Sherlock Holmes" that inspired Isaac Bashevis Singer: "These are not just detective stories but tales of Jewish ingenuity featuring an armed Jewish superhero." Kreppel died at Buchenwald in 1940.

Clues CFP: "Interwar Mysteries" (deadline Oct 12, 2018).

The Bat (1926), adapted
from the play by
Mary Roberts Rinehart
and Avery Hopwood

 

A new Call for Papers has been posted for a theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection on "Interwar Mysteries: The Golden Age and Beyond." It will be guest edited by University of Leicester's Victoria Stewart (author, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age, and a previous contributor to Clues). Although the period between the World Wars is known as the Golden Age of traditional mystery fiction, other literary forms such as the hard-boiled subgenre, true crime, and noir emerged that often reflected a grimmer reality. Articles of between 3300 and 6000 words are sought that examine this important crossroads in mystery, detective, and crime fiction, with a deadline of Oct 12, 2018.

Black pulp exhibition in Philadelphia.

Illustration from "Three Detective
Pards, or, Nobby Nick's Big Game"
by T. C. Harbaugh (1896)

"Black Pulp!" is a new exhibition on view until April 29 at Philadelphia's African American Museum, which features art from a century of works such as dime novels and Blaxploitation posters. The contributors include Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston as well as contemporary artists.

• WHYY on the exhibition

Robert Lesser collection of pulp art, NBMAA.

The Robert Lesser Collection of 200 pieces of pulp art, housed at the New Britain Museum of American Art, can now be viewed online. Pieces include artworks for Amazing Stories, Argosy, Detective Short Stories, Detective Tales, Dime Mystery Magazine, Doc Savage, Mystery Tales, The Shadow, Spicy Mystery, Weird Tales, and Wonder Stories.

Exhibition on pulp illustrator Gloria Stoll Karn.

July 1945 Detective Tales.
Cover by Gloria Stoll Karn

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, is featuring the exhibition "Gloria Stoll Karn: Pulp Romance" from February 10 to June 10, 2018. Karn, now 94, was one of the few female illustrators for pulp magazines in the 1940s.

• About the artist
• View Karn's November 1943 cover for Dime Mystery Magazine
• View Karn's March 1945 cover for Black Mask 

Pulp cover art exhibition in Florida.

Cover of 15 May 1937 Argosy included
in the "In the Shadows" exhibition. Note
contributors include Cornell Woolrich,
Lawrence G. Blochman, and Judson
Philips (aka Hugh Pentecost)

At Florida International University's Wolfsonian until July 9 is the student-curated exhibition "In the Shadows; American Pulp Cover Art." Included are covers from Argosy, Detective Fiction, Detective Novels Magazine, G-Men Detective, and Popular Detective. Wolfsonian chief librarian Frank Luca discusses the exhibition and the students' research aims here.

"The Artists Who Make Argosy."

4 Nov 1922 Argosy cover by
Stockton Mulford

In advance of July's PulpFest in Columbus, OH, Mike Chomko gives a preview of "The Artists Who Make Argosy," the upcoming session with David Saunders that will celebrate the contributing artists to the legendary pulp magazine launched in 1882. The magazine's contributing writers included Max Brand, Norbert Davis, Erle Stanley Gardner, Robert E. Howard, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Cornell Woolrich. Saunders is the son of illustrator Norman Saunders.

Exhibition on artist Everett Raymond Kinstler.

On view until July 4 at the Brinton Museum in Big Horn, Wyoming, is the exhibition "Journeys West and Beyond," which features the work of Everett Raymond Kinstler. Kinstler's oeuvre encompasses portraits of political figures, comic books, dime novels, westerns, and pulp works.

New pulp reprints from Altus Press.

I have ... a face like a gargoyle and the disposition of a tired tarantula. —Norbert Davis, May 1941 Argosy

A scene from Max Brand's
Champion of Lost Causes (1925)

Among the new releases of Altus Press, a specialist in pulp reprints:

• Doan and Carstairs: Their Complete Cases by Norbert Davis. Boozy PI Doan teams up with his lofty Great Dane, Carstairs.

• Champion of Lost Causes by Max Brand (introd. William F. Nolan). Samuel Loring takes up the cause of a woman accused of murder.

• Sabotage by Cleve F. Adams. Detective Rex McBride races to prevent the destruction of an important dam by an implacable enemy.