After being out of print for decades, the legendary “lost” issue of Spicy Zeppelin Stories is back. Sort of.
Back in in 1970 when Odyssey Publications was doing its several reprints, which I’ve posted on, someone mentioned, probably as a joke, that there was another spicy pulp out there. Another one to go along with Spicy Mysteries, Spicy Detective, Spicy Adventure, Spicy Western, etc. Strangely, one of the guys behind the spicies did do four issues of Zeppelin Stories pulp.
Will Murray offered to do this, and wrote up six stories to fill the “first and only” issue of the fictitious Spicy Zeppelin Stories from October 1936. Cover art was commissioned from Mike Symes. And then it never happened and Odyssey went under.
Later, thanks to Doug Ellis of Pulp Vault fame, in 1989 it was put out under his Tattered Pages Press. But as they couldn’t use the color cover artwork, new cover and interior artwork was done by Bobb Carter, though the cover artwork had to be… edited. BTW, it’s Bettie Page. Be advised, that while the interior artwork seems crude, the artwork in the original spicy pulps wasn’t anything better.
Now we get the complete package with the originally planned cover and all the interior artwork and originally planned cover art from the Tattered Pages Press edition plus an additional work, a sequel to the novel. The seven stories match up with a pulp genre: thrilling adventure, air war, mystery, G-man, weird menace, space opera, and western, but all centered around airships. Each also has a different pseudonym for the author.
For whatever reason, I never got a copy of the original one, though I looked in recent years. Now I have the stories. Full disclosure, I was sent a copy to review.
First up is our thrilling adventure novel, “Gondola Girl,” which stars King “Steel” Chane, the “King of the Zeppelins” who is building a fleet of zeppelins for commercial use. Someone is trying to wreck him, not just wrecking one of his ships, but has driven his secretary insane. Who is targeting him? During the test flight of his new stratosphere zeppelin, they are forced to an island in the South Pacific. Where there are several nude girls there. What is this all about and can our hero defeat his hidden foe and rescue the girls?
In “Gasbag Buckaroo,” cowboy Clay Long of the Bent Horseshoe Ranch has a problem. Someone is somehow stealing their cattle with no evidence of where they went. He soon discovers the cause and is able to rescue the ranch, as well as win the hand of its female owner.
“Hydrogen Horror” is our air-war story. Here British aviator Shawn Chetwynd is working undercover in WWI German. There he meets the mysterious woman Thalia Leppenzi. Is she a spy or just a femme fatale? And what side is she on? Yes, there will be zeppelins, as he gets involved in an aerial attack on the Allies. And Thalia is involved as well. Who’s side is she on?
The space-opera story is “Zeps of the Void,” starring Solar Smith. Is he a space pirate or a space vigilante? When the Space Zep Janus is hijacked by an array of aliens, we will learn the truth and who Solar Smith really is.
G-man Jeff Holt has a big mystery in “Rail Lair.” Somehow a passenger train has been waylaid in the Kentucky hills, and everyone is dead, most likely from a gas, but nothing is stolen. But Holt figures the real target is another train running the next day that will contain a secret cargo of gold. Can he figure things out with the help of a wild mountain girl before another disaster occurs?
Finally, we get “Catwalk Creeper,” our weird-menace tale. Set in a trans-Atlantic zeppelin, someone is killing female passengers by turning them into stone. Is this the ghost of Medusa, or something else? Can our detective hero stop whoever is behind this before his lovely girlfriend is the next victim??
As an addition, we get “Chane,” which appeared later. It’s a follow-up to the novel, having our hero Chane return decades later, though not in a spicy story.
Overall, I found these a great selection of stories. Even if you aren’t a fan of spicy pulps, these are still good stories and can serve as an intro to several pulp genres. In fact, I think these are probably better stories than many of the spicy pulp stories.
We even get hints of other stories, which sadly will probably never be written. So even if you aren’t a fan of spicy pulps, do check this one out. And if you’re a fan of Will Murray’s works, he has more in the works.
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