Welcome to Volume Three, Number One of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine.
In the first issue of 2023, Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine celebrates Colin Deerwood’s long running 40’s pulp detective serial, Better Than Dead, at the beginning of its third year! According to author Deerwood, he had not started out to write a serial fiction but was merely writing descriptions of the actions portrayed on the covers of old pulp magazines. “They began as sketches, no more than a couple of paragraphs,” he said in a recent interview, “With few exceptions, never longer than a page.” Deerwood would be the first to admit that what had started out as an idle exercise has taken on a life of its own.
For Phyllis Hularsdottir, Cheése Stands Alone was a chance to make imaginative use of her degree in the Psychology of Speculative History and her interest in the multiverse theory of cosmology. “I wanted to posit a shift in the science world at a point in history where biology takes the lead as the premier science and physics is just something engineers do,” she replied recently to a query. In Lydia Cheése’s post axial shift world, the reader enters an unfamiliar historical realm peopled by historically familiar names.
Pierre Anton Taylor, known around the office as ‘Pete,’ revealed at a recent writers meeting that he thought that the post-war pulp heroes were unrealistic and had gotten too big for their spandex. “There is never a good reason for revenge, no matter what ghosts are haunting you.” His Just Coincidence is a classic tale of just such vengeance gone wrong with overtones and correspondences from popular illustrated hero literature.
Patton D’Arque made his debut in Dime Pulp with his two-part short story, Gone Missing (Dime Pulp, Vol. 1, Nos 2,3) about a couple of grumpy and dangerous ex-cops turned investigators. He returns with the conclusion of his two part short story, Polka Dot Dress, a tale of conspiracy, assassination, hypnosis, and a mysterious woman in a polka dot dress. “I had no idea how it was going to end until I got there because I actually thought I was going someplace else with it,” he wrote in a recent email. But as a famous poet once said, “Speculation is the brain’s bread and butter.”
FYI: Dime Pulp Yearbook 21 contains the novels (The Last Resort and Better Than Dead) and the short fiction (Hard Boiled Myth and Gone Missing) of Volume One’s 12 issues, available for perusal in their entirety. If you missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial, clicking on the link at the beginning of this paragraph or on the menu bar above is a good way to catch up. Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring all the fantastic serial stories from Volume 2 in their entirety, will be available before too long.
If you’ve made it this far, go ahead and follow the links below to reading entertainment with the serial contents of Volume Three, Number 1
Special Note: Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine has changed its posting schedule from monthly issues to about once every forty-five days. Thus Volume Three will consist of eight issues (much to the relief of the overworked writers and production staff). Thank you for your understanding.
—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant
“Lackland Ask is the name. ‘Lack’ to my friends, ‘Don’t’ to those who think they’re funny. You might have seen my portrait on the cover of Black Mask, the crime fiction magazine. This is my story. It starts with a blonde. This kind of story always starts with a blonde.” Thus begins the seemingly non-stop, endless narrative of Better Than Dead in which women are not the only trouble although most of it, told with the wit and street savvy of Runyon and Parker.
Better Than Dead—23
The violent event that occurred more than half a century ago is brought into focus in an assisted living home for an elderly woman whose memory of that time is blocked much to the frustration of an academic researcher and her partner who who see the old woman as the key to uncovering who was behind the conspiracy that changed the course of history.
Polka Dot Dress II
In March of 1892, a Scotsman by the name of Arthur C. “Artie” Doyle was hanged by the neck until dead after being found guilty of a string of grisly murders of prostitutes in Whitechapel. At that moment, history veered off its presumed course and headed in a direction all its own in which the Great War never happened because the Kaiser was afraid of offending his grandmother, Queen Victoria, whose life has been prolonged by the wonders of biology. Her reign, known as the Pax Victoriana has lasted 180 years maintaining as many Victorian airs as possible while making accommodations to rapid advances in bio technology. Cheése Stands Alone poses a steampunk question, can Captain Lydia Cheése (pronounced “Chase”) find her father, the antigovernment turncoat and radical, Commodore Jack “Wild Goose” Cheése. And furthermore, will her quest take her around the globe and through alternate world histories in the requisite 80 days or is it the beginning of a lifelong journey?
Cheése Stands Alone VI
In Just Coincidence, a privileged young man with the unremarkable name of Wayne Bruce returns to the site where his father once had his business, a battery manufacturing plant, and where he often spent his childhood days hanging around the factory and the neighborhood. His return is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death and the vague feeling that his uncle is somehow involved. Appalled by the poverty and crime of the place he remembers fondly, he is moved to resolve the injustice of the socially marginalized and to wreak vengeance on those he believes are responsible for the death of his father. A personal coincidence brings together dark prince and dark knight joined in a fateful and tragic quest for justice.
Act Two, Scene 1, Part 1
Dime Pulp 