Before they founded Culture Publications and their Spicy line of pulp magazines, Frank Armer and Harry Donenfeld were major players in the field of the so-called “girlie” pulps.
Introduced to the reading public by William C. Clayton with the launching of Snappy Stories in 1912, the girlie pulps delved into sexual topics and featured illustrations and photographs of scantily clad women.
The success of Clayton’s “Magazine of Entertaining Fiction” soon led to imitators — Breezy Stories, Saucy Stories, Telling Tales, and others.
Frank Armer entered the girlie market in 1925 with the release of Artists & Models Magazine. Donenfeld served as Armer’s printer and before long, the two were producing magazines together. Their first success was Pep Stories, offering “New, Snappy, Spicy” stories. It would run for nearly 150 issues.
Other girlie magazines would follow, including Broadway Nights, Ginger Stories, Real Story Book, and the popular Spicy Stories.
When civic organizations began to pressure the publishers and distributors of girlie magazines, Armer and Donenfeld decided to combine sex with adventure, detective, mystery, and western fiction. Calling themselves Culture Publications, the two launched Spicy Detective Stories in early 1934.
Not only did the new pulp help reduce the pressure being applied to the publisher, but it also proved a hit. Sex sells!
Before long, Donenfeld and Armer began working on other titles along the same line. As Trojan Publishing Corporation, they produced a pair of 12-page “ashcan” issues of Spicy Adventure Stories and Spicy Mystery Stories, along with a trio of “Snappy” books — Snappy Adventure Stories, Snappy Detective Stories, and Snappy Mystery Stories. Never intended to reach the market, the books were produced for trademark and copyright purposes.
Although the “Snappy” titles never got beyond the pamphlet stage, both Spicy-Adventure Stories and Spicy Mystery Stories became popular and long-running titles in the Culture line of pulp magazines. A fourth “Spicy” title — Spicy Western Stories — came later, premiering with an issue dated November 1936.
The first newsstand issue of Spicy-Adventure Stories — dated November 1934 and adorned with a cover by H. J. Ward — carried several stories by Spicy Detective star Robert Leslie Bellem and his cohorts in snappiness, E. Hoffmann Price and Norman Daniels. They would be joined in later issues by such Spicy regulars as Wyatt Blassingame, Don Cameron, Hugh B. Cave (writing as Justin Case), Day Keene, Edwin Truett Long, James P. Olsen, Victor Rousseau, and others. Robert E. Howard signed on in 1936, penning a handful of “Wild Bill Clanton” stories using the name of Sam Walser. The magazine would reprint three of these stories in 1942, masked by new titles and three new pen names.
Featuring the spicy artwork of H. J. Ward, Harry L. Parkhurst, and other artists, Spicy-Adventure Stories and its companions were often sold under the counter. It published adventure yarns tinged with sex that would be considered rather tame today. But civic groups of the time felt otherwise.
After years of battling the censors and various do-gooders, the “Spicy” pulps were converted to the “Speed” line of magazines, with the first of the “Speed” titles popping up on newsstands in late 1942. Still featuring the same leggy women on its covers, Speed Adventure Stories used the same cover artists and themes. However, the women depicted on the covers were almost always fully clothed and the magazine’s days were numbered. Donenfeld was concentrating his efforts more on his very successful line of comic books. Perhaps you’ve heard of DC Comics?
The final issue of Speed Adventure Stories appeared in late 1945. It was dated January 1946 and featured cover art by Joseph Szokoli, the son of Harry Donenfeld’s (and his gangster friend Frank Costello’s) favorite barber. The other “Speed” titles were not far behind, with Speed Western Stories the final one, lasting through the end of 1947.
Our featured image is excerpted from H. J. Ward’s cover art for the April 1936 issue of Spicy-Adventure Stories. The cover story is Robert E. Howard’s first Wild-Bill Clanton story, “She-Devil.” Another Ward cover — dated November 1934 — adorned the first issue of Spicy-Adventure Stories, featured above.
Our lead image is Pep Stories for June 1927, with cover art by Frank Dorias. The first issue of Pep Stories — it had previously been called Pep! — the title was one of Donenfeld’s most successful “girlie” magazines.
After the introduction of Spicy Detective Stories in 1934 was a hit, Harry Donenfeld and Frank Armer quickly produced “ashcan” versions of Spicy Adventure Stories and Spicy Mystery Stories to gain trademarks and copyrights with the United States government. The cover for the July 1934 Spicy Adventure Stories ashcan is pictured above, with art by Adolphe Barreaux, the art director of Donenfeld Magazines and Culture Publications.
When H. J. Ward — the regular cover artist for the spicy pulps — unexpectedly passed away in 1945, Joseph Szokoli “provided continuity to the cover designs by creating dozens of covers that resemble Ward’s sensational subjects and compositions.” A master of airbrush technique, Szokoli painted the cover art for the final issue of Speed Adventure Stories, dated January 1946.
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