THE PULP CALENDAR: December 13

Not long after they slipped from weekly to biweekly status, the Munsey flagships Argosy and Detective Fiction experimented with photo covers that were (probably) paid publicity for movie studios. This 1941 effort is actually the only such photo cover for the former Detective Fiction Weekly. Gloria Franklin is identified as a Republic Pictures starlet but only made three pictures for that studio, and only appeared on screen seven times in a brief career, three times uncredited. Her big role, from a pulp standpoint, was Fah  Lo Suee in Republic's 1940 serial Drums of Fu Manchu. She had ninth billing in 1941's The Gay Vagabond. I guess the cover didn't help her much. Arguably, she was already finished. She wouldn't make another movie until 1947. No novelettes this issue; only short stories and an installment of Richard Sale's serial The Devil's Mistress. Dale Clark and William R. Cox are the best known of the other authors. The two "True Crime Mysteries" are the cover story, J. Hoyt Cummings' "Romantic Killer" and J. Denton Scott's "Marked for Murder." Detective Fiction would limp along in this fashion until March 1942, when it went monthly. In July, in a desperate attempt to woo the true-crime crowd, Munsey took "Fiction" off the cover altogether.