THIS year for Mosquito Month we’re going to focus on some of Ralph Oppenheim’s Detective fiction. An overwhelming majority of Oppenheim’s pulp output were aviation stories, many featuring our intrepid trio, The Three Mosquitoes. In 1933, when the Mosquitoes were winding down their adventures in Popular Publications aviation magazines, Oppenheim tried his hand at a new genre that was very popular at the time—detective fiction. Over the next fourteen years oppenheim would produce eighteen detective stories for the some of the leading magazines in the field—Dime Detective and Dime Mystery Magazines, Popular Detective, Thrilling Detective, Thrilling Mystery, Black Book Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Strange Detective Mysteries and Phantom Detective—as well as even ghost writing a Phantom Detective story (”Murder Calls the Phantom” March 1941).

Throughout all his detective stories, he had a number of detectives that returned in subsequent stories. These are the detective stories we’re going to feature this month. To get things going, we’ll start with the first of Oppenheim’s detective stories—”The Death Lady” featured on the cover! and in the pages of the July 15th, 1933 issue of Dime Detective Magazine!

“The Death Lady” introduces us to “Honest” Glen Kelsey, a private dick who’s built his reputation on the strength of his trustworthiness! “‘Honest Glen Kelsey’—the man you can trust—three years with the Department of Justice, etcetera, etcetera.” His assistant, Mr. Peebles, was the direct antithesis to the young, broad-shouldered Kelsey, whose blue eyes, with their humor wrinkles, showed the lust for adventure—rather he was bald, near-sighted, and very clerkish, with spectacles on his thin nose.

George Cranford visits Kelsey’s office and explains the crux of the case:

“We have become what you might call country gentlemen,” George Cranford explained. “And since we’ve settled up there our life has been stainless; our reputation in the town is unimpeachable. But unfortunately,” his voice faltered, “there is something in the past, something which Stephen and I—Lord, I had hoped it was buried. But the past always comes back. Mr. Kelsey—the past always comes back. I was just beginning to forget—and then, only last week, came the first of the threats. Threats, Mr. Kelsey, from somebody my brother and I were both certain had died years ago—somebody,” his voice was a shaky whisper, “who has returned as if from the grave—from the dead—”

Cranford refuses to divulge too much information in Kelsey’s office and requests he come out to their Connecticut home, but entrust him with a valuable box before departing telling him to keep it in a safe place! Upon opening the box, Kelsey finds only small sharp rocks.

After narrowly getting crushed by a tree just outside the Cranford’s home, Kelsey arrives at the Cranford’s to find a a small group of suspects in the house: besides George and his brother Stephen, their niece from a third brother Ellen; “old family friend” Curtis Harvey; and the swarthy, almost olive-skinned Carlos, the new chauffeur.

Shortly after his arrival, George himself turns up dead and brutally mutilated on the porch! The sheriff is called in, questions everyone and locks down the house with Kelsey inside which does afford him a chance to get more information on people and search for information.

In addition to the question of who the murder is, is the question of why and or how the bodies are turning up mutalated. A question which is spoiled by the cover of the magazine which shows a man torturing another within a Iron Lady! That still leaves the questions of who and why—

From the pages of the July15th, 1933 issue of Dime Detective Magazine, It’s Ralph Oppenheim’s “Honest” Glen Kelsey in “The Death Lady!”

There she stood—that enigmatic murder smile welded on her lips—waiting to clasp her victims in a death embrace. What was this horror-creature who cast her torture shadow over the House of Cranford—whose lightest caress meant bloody mutilation for those she wooed?

• Download “The Death Lady” (July 15, 1933, Dime Detective Magazine)

“Honest” Glen Kelsey would return for a second and final time a few months later. Once again featured on the cover and in the pages of the September 15th 1933 Dime Detective Magazine in a story titled “Brand of the Beast”.

Next week: It’s Thrilling Detective’s Dave Rogers, State Trooper!

William E. Barrett is one of our favorite authors. Before he became renown for such classics as The Left Hand of God and Lilies of The Field, Barrett honed his craft across the pages of the pulp magazines—writing all matter of stories from Mystery to Detective to Aviation and War. Here at Age of Aces Books he’s best known for his nine Iron Ace stories which ran in Sky Birds in the mid ’30s!

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Recently I picked up a couple of issues of Dime Detective Magazine from 1935—May 15th and October, both featuring William E. Barrett’s unconventional crime solver, tattoo artist Needle Mike. And both featuring great Walter Baumhofer covers! Pretty decent shape for their price aside from the fact someone had to write their name across the guy’s chest on the May issue.

As I looked at it, I was thinking it looked familiar. . .
It couldn’t be . . .
. . . but I think it is.

Matching it up with other examples I have . . .

it matches pretty well—I think it’s William E Barrett’s signature scrawled across the chinaman’s chest! I got me a surprise signed copy!

And Tell Us About Yourself

SINCE William E. Barrett’s birthday is on the 16th of this month, we’re celebrating Barrett all month long with one of his stories each of the next three Fridays. To lay a little ground work, here is an autobiography Barrett had in the first and only issue of the digest-sized Swift Story Magazine (It fits in your pocket!) from November 1930:

I VENTED my first squawk at life in the City of New York on November 16, 1900. It was snowing like blazes that day, if I remember rightly. Anyway, 1 managed to survive the hazards of Manhattan boyhood until I was sixteen, then, while the native New Yorkers of my age were pouring in from Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota, I followed the family star of destiny to Colorado. I had prepared at Manhattan College Prep in New York for an engineering career, but this proved to be a misdeal and I took a whirl at reporting for a Denver daily. I never progressed past the cub stage and was fervently advised by a harassed city ed. that I never would. After that I became one of the young men who signed the coupon.

I took a correspondence course in engineering and went to work for a power company, continuing the engineering studies at night. After several years of misery at the drafting board an engineer, who took pride in his profession, intervened.

“Get thee into publicity work,” he said. “I’ll help you. Anything which reduces the quota of rotten engineers is a blessing, even if it adds to the ranks of the press agents.”

A publicity job with a big electrical manufacturer took me all over the West—mining camps, oil towns and every place where spectacular installations were made.

But presently some base deceiver told me about the big pay and easy hours in fictioneering and I tried my hand. By the time I found out the horrible truth, I was too badly bitten by the bug ever to escape. I learned to fly with the idea of writing air stories that would be authentic, then took a publicity job with a large aircraft company for about a year. Derek Dane was evolved out of the experiences of that year which brought me in touch with many characters fully as picturesque in background as Dane—men to whom the dramatic is daily fare.

Not because Mr. Patten is the boss when I write for you, but because it is so, I want to acknowledge him as one of the biggest influences in my life—that before I even knew his name was Patten. His Merriwell stories dominated my youth, and nobody ever toiled harder to be like some one than I did to be like Frank Merriwell. Not at all athletic, nor inclined to “big” effort, I still managed to make four school letters struggling to be Merriwell. Many other decisions were Merriwell colored, too—and a career is only a series of effects from a multitude of small decisions. I have two trunks of Merriwells—every one published—and will have my boy read them some time.

My total published stuff, if any one cares, is 263 short stories, 10 complete novels, 18 novelettes and countless articles. In Derek Dane I am not trying to create a detective of the master-mind school. Great thinkers are not lions for courage—thought convinces them of the folly of risk. I am thinking of the men who brought the law to the wilderness in the first place (the same type who will bring it back when it strays). Most of them were men who sought escape from the law some place else— not sticklers for the fine points of the written law, but foursquare for a square deal and for the rights of human beings to live their lives and keep what they have. Derek Dane stands for that and, if he steps outside the statute book to get results, he has fundamental laws to justify him.

I hope that the readers of Swift Story Magazine will like Derek Dane, and I’ll give them my pledge that as they get to know him better with succeeding yarns they will find him developing an increasing ability to entertain them. He is too complex a character to put across in one story.

My wife made her first short story sale this week and we are in a celebrating mood. She has helped me with so many of mine that it is a big kick to see her push across a yarn of her own. I’ve got a boy and a girl—to round out the personal narrative—and I’m still in love. . . .

Sorry there isn’t more plot or drama or excitement in this—but if there was, this being a sordid age, I’d probably stick a name like Pete Jones on myself and sell the darn thing.

Hasta luego,