The cover for #47 is an original piece, done with AI, as is the back cover, both tied to stories in this issue.
Taking up about half the issue are two stories with C. Auguste Dupin, who is considered the first fictional detective, and the term “ratiocination” was coined by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49).
Many probably don’t know that Poe wrote three Dupin stories. We get the first one, “Murders in the Rue Morgue” from 1841. So if you never read it, here’s your chance. This is preceded by a new story by U.K. author Ernest Dudley (1908-2006) that actually first appeared in 2011. “The Beetle” gives Dupin another baffling murder mystery. Here joined by Dr. Lessiter, he gets involved with a bizarre case involving a young lady who the doctor has proposed to which includes elements of Lovecraftian horror.
For more classic pulp fiction, we get two works that first appeared in the U.K. “The Follower,” by Shelley Smith (1912-98) (who was actually Nancy Hermione Bodington), is a kind of reverse ghost story. Another strange tale is “Casualty” by John Burke (1922-2011), about birth and rebirth in a haunted hospital.
For New Pulp fiction, we get a western tale, “Vaquero’s Vengeance” by Scott Forbes Crawford, about the titular character riding after the outlaw who killed his outfit, along with his best friend. Will he succeed or die trying? “Dead Air” by D.G. Critchley is an interesting little detective story about an accident that wasn’t an accident. And from Keith Vile is a science fiction tale of “Psycho Ants.” What are they and what do they mean for mankind?
Appropriate for this volume with detective tales with the first fictional detective, we get a different Sherlock Holmes pastiche in Teel James Glenn‘s “The Adventure of Sherlock Hominid,” which gives an alternate world were several hominid races emerged and where Sherlock Holmes is a chimpanzee.
For non-fiction, we get an editorial from Audrey Parente. Pulp researcher Will Murray gives a photo essay on the ending of the pulps in “Pulp Fiction Dateline: Rest in Pulp,” focusing on the major pulps and publishers shutting down in 1949 and ’50. James Reasoner‘s “Rough Edges” column gives a review of Perley Poore Sheehan‘s “Abu, the Dawn Maker” which was serialized in All-Story Cavalier Weekly in 1915. This one hasn’t been reprinted, so hopefully in a future omnibus of Sheehan’s works Steeger Books can include it.
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