It’s Halloween. Imagine waking up from a deep sleep to find an enormous bat hovering above your bed. Its hypnotic eyes are fixed upon you. Razor-sharp fangs fill its mouth.
Or you find yourself snatched from your dressing room by cloaked figures. They carry you to a graveyard where, under the night sky, you realize your captors have no flesh. Raising you aloft with skeletal hands, their bone-white skulls grin in anticipation of the coming feast.
These are the nightmare scenarios of Spicy Mystery Stories — Culture Publications’ weird-menace pulp.
In late 1933, Popular’s Harry Steeger revamped the moribund Dime Mystery Book Magazine. Inspired by the Grand Guignol Theater of Paris, Steeger relaunched the pulp as Dime Mystery Magazine and created the first weird-menace magazine.
“The so-called ‘shudder’ or ‘weird-menace’ titles were a blood-red splash of color in the grey days of the Great Depression. They announced their monthly wares with circus-poster-style covers featuring voluptuous under-dressed beauties being pursued by hordes of leering lunatics as bent as boomerangs. Their promise: cheap thrills, and plenty of them.”
Debuting in the fall of 1933, Dime Mystery was a hit. So were its two companions, Terror Tales and Horror Stories. Both were introduced about a year after the change.
Before long, other publishers released their own weird-menace pulps, including Frank Armer’s and Harry Donenfeld’s Culture Publications.
Although an ashcan edition was produced in 1934 to establish a trademark, Spicy Mystery Stories debuted in the spring of 1935. Dated June, the first newsstand issue of the new weird-menace pulp featured one of H. J. Ward’s classic covers combining sex and the supernatural.
Inside were Robert Leslie Bellem’s title story, “Fangs of the Bat,” along with three other yarns by the same author using various pseudonyms. Edwin Truett Long — likewise hiding behind other names — was responsible for most of the remaining stories in the issue.
Joining Bellem and Long in later issues were Wyatt Blassingame, Hugh B. Cave (as Justin Case), Don Cameron, E. Hoffman Price, Victor Rousseau, John A. Saxon, and Howard Wandrei. Occasionally assisting were Norman Daniels, Henry Kuttner, Arthur Leo Zagat, and other pulpsters. Their stories were a mix of weird menace and supernatural fiction, with any number of sexual teases thrown in to add some spice.
She was as beautiful as a poet’s dream, tall and slim, but rounded, with hair that was pale gold, eyes a heavenly blue, and skin like alabaster. Rubies were not more red than her lips, nor pearls whiter than her teeth. Beneath her simple, but rich, gown of black velvet, her breasts swelled gloriously.
Lady Diane let fall her mantle, and laid aside her garments, one by one, all but a wisp of filmy cloth about her breasts, and another about her loins. . . . Again the wizard’s eyes gleamed brighter, and even Pietro almost forgot his terror. For her body, and her limbs, and her breasts, were perfect as those of Aphrodite herself . . .
The touch of her fingers on his arm was flame. His eyes glowed passionately when they caressed the curve of her soft breasts, sought and found the beginning of the cleft between them when the low neck fell away. Once she leaned toward him and picked something from the floor. Her breast brushed against his knee. He felt shock, numbed by the contact, and his fingers opened and closed convulsively. The smile she gave him when she sat up was taunting.
The stories are profusely illustrated, particularly with the curve of soft breasts and the beginning of the cleft between them. Some of the drawings depict unclothed women, their hair curling across all the right places or a hand resting across the naughty bits.
As the 1930s gave way to the forties, do-gooders led by New York Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia and others pressured publishers to tone things down. The last of the Spicy pulps was dated December 1942.
As the old year gave way to the new, Speed Mystery was introduced by the renamed Trojan Publishing. Its cover sported a fully clothed woman menaced by a man garbed in black. Granted, one can still see the girl’s alabaster skin through the sheer gown she is wearing. However, there’s no sign of the beginning of the cleft between her gloriously swelling breasts.
Speed Mystery labored on for nineteen more issues, its final number featuring an abridged novel and a pair of articles. A shell of its former self, the magazine shuddered one last time with its March 1946 issue.
We’ll be saluting the Spicy pulps and more at our 2024 PulpFest. We hope you’ll join us from August 1 – 4 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh – Cranberry in Mars, Pennsylvania for “Spice, Spies, Shaw,” and more at PulpFest 2024.
Happy Halloween.
Please welcome Jeanne Harding to PulpFest’s stable of writing fiends. A fan of horror and fantasy fiction, Jeanne attended her first PulpFest this year, helping to celebrate the centennial of Weird Tales.
Given her interests, we asked Jeanne to explore Culture Publications’ Spicy Mystery Stories as her initial contribution to our website.
Our featured image is adapted from the March 1936 issue of Spicy Mystery Stories, with a cover by William F. Soare. Our lead image is H. L. Parkhurst’s cover for the November 1935 number of the pulp magazine. The remaining illustrations in our post include Dime Mystery Magazine for October 1933, with a cover by Walter M. Baumhofer; H. J. Ward’s cover for Spicy Mystery Stories for June 1935; and Allen Anderson’s cover for the February 1943 number of Speed Mystery.
Please visit our YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@pulpfest for more of Spicy Mystery Stories. You’ll find Craig McDonald’s latest film here. And if you’ve not done so already, join the hundreds of pulp fans who’ve already subscribed to the PulpFest YouTube Channel.
