Magazine Review: High Adventure #160: Ten Detective Aces Special edited by John P. Gunnison
Ten Detective Aces started publication in 1928 under the title The Dragnet Magazine and primarily featured gangster stories. Public interest in gangsters as a separate subgenre was fading, so in 1930 the magazine started featuring more general crime and detective stories under the title Detective-Dragnet Magazine, and in 1933 switched to Ten Detective Aces, which lasted until 1949. As suggested by the title, the magazine’s gimmick was having ten short stories in each issue.
This issue of High Adventure reprints nine stories from the July 1937 and May 1938 issues.
“Prey of the Steel Shark” by S.J. Bailey starts off the issue with a bang. Private eye Bill Trent was sent to prison for a crime he did not commit, and assigned to drive nitroglycerin trucks, a certain death sentence. Or it would have been had not the beautiful Nayla Thatcher offered him a deal. The gang she worked for would fake his death in a nitro explosion, in return for him joining the gang.
The gang, as it happens, are submarine pirates, working under former U-boat commander Schmidt. They attack isolated cargo vessels, threaten them with torpedoes to get their valuables, then torpedo the ships anyway and kill any survivors. Almost all of them are legally dead, having been recruited much as Bill was.
And how does all this tie in to the case Bill was working when he got framed for murder? The bad guys’ plan is overly elaborate, so it’s no wonder it collapsed under its own weight, but the specific thing that does them in was one baddie not telling the other about his side project.
“Murder Breeds Murder” by William R. Cox has gambling house employee Donnie Jordine walking in on his manager “Doc” Yost to find the man’s head caved in. What follows is a rapid succession of deaths as vengeance takes its toll–with a final twist revealed when Donnie is the last man standing. A pretty tight story.
“Flowers of Vengeance” by Maitland Scott is about a warehouse robbery by “Bull” Gargan. Bull’s sore because college boy Charlie Rice is making time with the girl Bull likes, and is in line for a manager position that Bull was turned down for due to his lack of education. Bull plans to make enough money to set himself up in the rackets and frame Charlie for the crime. But as it happens, sometimes book smarts are just what you need.
“Dead Men Pay Debts” by G.T. Fleming-Roberts is back to the gambling houses. Ace Abbott runs a “clean” establishment, and the crooked gambling bosses in town don’t like that. Due to a series of unfortunate events, secretary Delli O’Brien gets locked in the casino vault. Ace can either open the vault and allow the crooks to empty it of money, or allow Delli to slowly suffocate. Not a good set of choices!
Has a bit of sexual harassment in the form of unwanted touching by a bad guy. (“He never seemed to notice that her blue eyes began saying ‘No’ every time he entered the room.”) Oh, and there’s a nifty twist long-time pulp fans will see coming a mile away.
“Half-Pint to Hell” by Walter Walker stars a short milkman who gets angry that the customers at his last stop won’t wash the empties. (The Thirties equivalent of “be kind, please rewind.”) So he decides to give them a piece of his mind, only to stumble into a kidnapping! There’s only one chance to summon help, if he can trick the crooks into doing one particular thing….
“China Wary” by Joe Archibald is part of the “Dizzy Duo” series. Scoop Binney and Snooty Piper are reporters for The Evening Star who are friends and rivals and often get mixed up in mysteries. When Chinese businessman Sum Hooey is murdered, Scoop thinks he has finally stolen a march on Snooty as to the identity of the killer.
Wow, has this story aged badly. It’s full of “funny” racism against Chinese people and burlesque accents. Scoop assaulting a police officer is less problematic, but still in poor taste considering that he does so by exploiting the man’s illness. “Punch-down” humor just doesn’t have the appeal it used to. It’s bad enough I’m not even going to talk about the plot.
“Dime a Death” by Cleve F. Adams stars Macklin McCabe, rye drinker and former investigator for the district attorney’s office. Now in private practice, he’s not doing so well, but before he can be enticed with a generous employment offer from a rival agency, Macklin gets involved with a young woman who claims she’s not a murderer.
This would be more believable if people didn’t keep turning up dead around her. On the other hand, there’s some fishy politics going on, could it be she’s really innocent? Content warning: suicide.
“Death Is My Life” by Carl McK. Saunders is part of the Detective Captain John Murdock series. A young man comes to the police, claiming that his girlfriend used to work for the Top Hat nightclub, and has vanished. The owner of Top Hat claims he’s never heard of her. Murdock investigates to discover a variation on the old badger game, but this time there’s murder! Content warning: suicide.
Gun Party De Luxe by Harold F. Sorenson introduces us to Frank Trice, a private eye who specializes in finding missing objects. He’s lured to an apartment to help search for some missing pearls, but the crooks have no intention of letting him or the young lady who was trying to buy back the pearls live once they’re found. Content warning: torture.
“Eyes that Think” by Maitland Scott winds up this issue with the tale of Joe Hyde, a fugitive who decides to stick up Broom’s delicatessen on the way out of town. Joe’s ethnic prejudice dooms him, as he assumes the amusingly-accented Dutch owner is stupid. Broom is actually quite bright, and the local cop is quick on the uptake.
Overall, eight decent stories, and one real clunker. The lead story is probably the best, but I enjoyed the Maitland Scott stories most. The back cover copy has a silly typo: “living dead man” and “loving dead man” suggest very different story moods.
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