‘Mystery Men (& Women),’ Vol. 10

We recently got the 10th volume in Airship 27‘s Mystery Men (& Women) series of New Pulp characters. It’s impressive that this series is now up to 10 volumes, which is a great milestone.

This is more than any other of Airship 27‘s series other than their Sherlock Holmes series.

Mystery Men (& Women) is kind of like DC’s old Showcase comicbook or Street & Smith‘s Crime Busters in providing a variety of New Pulp characters. Sadly, we haven’t gotten many who have spawned their own series.

In Vol. 10, we get another quartet of stories, including two characters returning from previous volumes. As usual, each story gets several illustrations by Rob Davis, who also did the cover.

Teel James Glenn gives us a new aviator hero in Skymarshal, which started out as an Airboy story. It’s also set in an alternate 1904s where dirigibles are used as weapons of war and the U.S. has been in conflict with the Russian Empire. A strange series of explosions in the mid-West, which includes the destruction of a military airship, brings in Skymarshal. He is really Danny Krimson, raised by an abbot who built an unusual aircraft called Babe. Teamed up with a young lady, they investigate things and expose the threat behind the attacks.

The Black Wraith by Jonathan W. Sweet returns from appearing in Vol. 9 (and her first appearance in The Red Jackal book Ghosts of the Jackal) with another tale. She is Charlie Cook, a Korean-American female detective operating in Washington, D.C., where she usually has female clients. An unusual murder starts off this adventure. Asked by a widow to look into things, her police contact passes along a different case. In both, men acted strangely but were then killed, so the cases were closed. What caused their strange behavior, and how are they linked? And we get further setup for more stories.

In Carson Demmans‘ tale, we get one of the strangest New Pulp Hero. Minor gangster Machine Gun Malone is about to be executed by electric chair for murdering in broad day a rival gangster. When the switch is pulled and he finds himself heading to Hell, something intervenes. He now finds himself a 13-year-old! He is rescued by the “gun moll” member of his small gang, claiming he’s the son of Malone. He now lives with his old gang. But he has a chance to do things differently, and he wants to be good rather than bad. He soon starts helping a few, calling himself Dead Man Walking. But his big mystery is trying to figure out who was behind sending him to kill his so-called rival and what was really behind it. Can he do so, using his new, strange abilities?

And back from Vol. 7, we get The Ghoul, by Harding McFaddon and Eleanor Hawkins, where we finally meet his other associates, two pairs of twins: Aym and Act, and Think and Thunk. Back also is Marion “Camera Girl” McGiven. Here they are looking into a matter of missing children — a lot of missing children. They find way more than what they expected.

It’s another good collections of stories. I hope we get more with The Black Wraith, as things are set up for further stories. We are promised more with Dead Man Walking. And a solo Camera Girl story is in the works. And I expect we’ll get more stories with The Ghoul and his associates. I thought Skymarshal was interesting, and we don’t get enough aviation New Pulp heroes. Who knows about that one? I have no idea when we’ll see Vol. 11, but it should be good.