In Mars, Pennsylvania — home to PulpFest — there is a chill in the air. Is winter approaching, or is it a ghost?
Halloween is near, and so is the anniversary of pulp writer Theodore A. Tinsley’s birth. He was born on October 27, 1894.
Tinsley got his start in the pulps, thanks to his artist brother, Frank. According to the late Will Murray, Tinsley read the manuscripts his brother illustrated. Thinking he could do better, he penned “Cross Words at the Circle K,” and sold it to Fiction House’s Action Stories.
Before long, Ted was contributing regularly to the publisher’s western and aviation pulps. He moved into the detective field — again assisted by his brother, Frank — when he created Major Lacy and his crime-fighting unit of ex-Marines, Amusement, Inc., for the Fiction House crime pulp Black Aces, and later Dell’s All Detective Magazine.
Later in his career, Ted Tinsley wrote nearly thirty adventures featuring The Shadow for Street & Smith; about forty tales of the pioneering female detective Carrie Cashin for Crime Busters and Street & Smith’s Mystery Magazine; and two dozen stories concerning a wisecracking gossip reporter named Jerry Tracy for Black Mask. He also wrote scripts for The Shadow Radio Show, a CBS radio program broadcast during 1934 – 35 that featured the character as the narrator rather than the story’s protagonist.
But it’s nearly Halloween. So let’s look at Tinsley’s “The Man on the Platform,” his sole contribution to “The Unique Magazine.”
Published in the February 1936 number of Weird Tales, Tinsley’s tale runs about two full pages. It’s one of those yarns about a dream in which a man foresees his own death.
“I’m standing on a railroad track, cold with fear. I can hear the hum and click of steel rails, and I know there’s an invisible train rushing toward me at express speed. . . . Someone is planning to kill me. A — a dwarf conductor with a chalk-white face and round, staring eyes. There was — blood on his face. . . .”
Unfortunately for the man—one of New York’s biggest cotton-goods manufacturers—he misinterprets his dream and dies. Avoiding a train trip, he dies in an automobile accident, the result of his own fears.
His smiling mouth gaped in frozen horror. Straight ahead of him was the face he had seen in the dream. He screamed hoarsely, threw a terrified arm upward. The car swerved, crashed through a whitewashed fence, rolled over and over through a screen of bushes and smashed upside down on a railroad track.
With the pulp market slowing, Theodore Tinsley worked for the Writer’s Division of the Office of War Information during the Second World War. Afterward, he worked in public relations for the Veterans Administration. In 1960, he retired to his wife’s hometown in Alabama. There, he died of lung cancer in 1979, at the age of eighty-four.
We hope you’ll join us August 5 to 8 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh – Cranberry in Mars, Pennsylvania, to celebrate The Shadow and more at PulpFest 2027.
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us . . . to PulpFest 2027!
Happy Halloween! You’ll find your treat on our YouTube Channel.
And while you’re there, be sure to subscribe.
Our featured image is excerpted from Margaret Brundage’s cover for the February 1936 issue of Weird Tales, illustrating the novella “Coils of the Silver Serpent,” by Forbes Parkhill.
Our lead image is the cover of The Shadow Magazine, November 1, 1936, with cover by George Rozen, illustrating Theodore A. Tinsley’s first Shadow adventure, “Partners in Peril.”
Derek Starr is a writer and popular culture enthusiast who began contributing to our website in 2022. He particularly enjoys the Fiction House pulps. One of his favorites is Planet Stories, the publisher’s legendary science fiction pulp. He’s also a fan of their air pulps and Action Stories.
