Doctor Coffin: The Living-Dead Man from Off-Trail Publications reprints eight of the 15 Doctor Coffin stories that ran for a year and half in Thrilling Detective magazine in 1932-33. These are all short stories of this lesser known, early pulp hero.
I do wish that this had been a complete reprinting of stories. Another one is reprinted in Adventure House‘s Thrilling Detective Heroes, along with more info on the author, Perley Poore Sheehan. It’s interesting that when these stories appeared, The Shadow had come out a year earlier. The Mr. Death series had started in Thrilling Detective a few months before and wrapped up shortly after Doctor Coffin began. Phantom Detective and Doc Savage would begin during Doctor Coffin’s run. So an undeserved, overlooked, early pulp hero.
So, who is Doctor Coffin? We learn more about him in the first story, which serves as a sort-of origin story. We learn he is really well-known character actor Del Manning, known as the “Man of 500 Faces” and performs all his roles in make-up. While he is Del Manning, he is also Doctor Coffin, the owner of a successful chain of funeral homes in the Hollywood area, who has been assembling a group of assistants. Why is not too clear.
In the first story, we learn that Del Manning is yet another alias. He is really Jimmy Delman, who got in trouble with the law at a young age, and was jailed, but later escaped. Now, after a criminal has killed his brother, he is bringing that criminal to justice. It was surprising to me that he gave out this info to a police officer who should want to arrest him, rather then work with him to bring in other criminals.
The first several stories are set in Hollywood, around the movie industry. Seeing as how Sheehan had worked for years as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, this is natural. Later stories seem more set in the New York area, with Doctor Coffin now called Skullface by the underworld. Wish the other stories were included to see if this was a shift in the stories over time.
In the first couple of stories, Doctor Coffin is assisted by a strange group who sadly are pretty much dropped after the second story. Only a couple reappear in very minor roles in any of the other stories, which mainly focus on Doctor Coffin alone. Perhaps Sheehan found it hard to work in these additional characters in the other stories.
Overall, a good collection of well-written stories.
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