While H. Bedford-Jones (1887-1949) had stories in a several pulp magazines, he was also able to get a few in Weird Tales.
Among these was a short, four-story series called “The Adventures of a Professional Corpse” that ran in the July, September, and November 1940, and March 1941 issues. The series was cover featured in July, with a nice Margaret Brundage cover.
Steeger Books has reprinted the whole series in a single volume, Adventures of a Professional Corpse, as part of their H. Bedford-Jones Library. The Brundage cover is used as the cover of the volume, and we get the interior artwork that appeared with three of the stories, but I am not sure of the artist. We also get the covers of all the four issues on the back.
The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box has also reprinted the whole series in a single volume as part of their Pocketbook Lost Treasures of the Pulp series, with the Brundage cover as well and I assume the interior artwork as well.
James F. Bronson is our “professional corpse.” He takes on assignments that have him “die” as part of the work, but nothing illegal. We learn his background in the first story, that he has been doing as his career for a dozen years. A poor farmer from western Canada, he found that due to a unique physiology and a strange draught brought back by an uncle, he can appear dead to most tests. The first story, which mentions a couple of other cases covered in the other stories, tells of his first “case.”
In his first outing, he is hired by an attorney to help the case of his client. She is a widow of a very rich man and is the guardian of his daughter, now 18. But the man’s sister is trying to become the daughter’s guardian, obviously to get control of more of the estate. Bronson is slowly introduced to them, and winds up marrying the daughter. How does this help them? Read and find out.
By the time of the event in the second story, Bronson has teamed up with a doctor, Dr. Roesch, who appears in the rest of this series. This time he will help a young woman who is an unmarried mother, working as a “strip dancer.” By appearing as her husband, she can get her parents to accept her daughter. But is there more to this?
The third story tells of an event where Dr. Roesch has joined him. This time Bronson is hired by a flower shop owner who is really a gangster who runs half the rackets in town. But he’s not your usual gangster, never having killed anyone, nor does he have any killers in his employ. He needs Bronson to pull a prank on his wife that will also help his standing among some of his associates. While successful in one way, it goes bad in another.
The final story gives us Bronson’s final case. Here the two are engaged by a man to expose a medium who had swindled his wife after the death of their child. And when she realized he was a fraud, the shock killed her. Bronson and the widower are successful, but things don’t work out quite as they or we would expect. And both Bronson and Dr. Roesch retire from this work.
Overall, it’s an interesting little series. The whole theme of the series is weird, so probably most appropriate for Weird Tales, especially with the final story. I’m not sure why this series had only four stories. I’ve seen this with many other brief Bedford-Jones series that have only four stories in them, which are planned as such; others are set for six stories. Were these standards of some such? I am reminded of comicbook mini-series that were created in the 1980s and how many where four issues. So I can only think Bedford-Jones could come up with only four scenarios, and created this finite series of stories.
In addition to these works and a reprinted novel, Bedford-Jones has six short stories in Weird Tales, including one under a pseudonym. I think it would be great if all of those were collected into a single volume, say “H. Bedford-Jones in Weird Tales” or the like.
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