Welcome to Volume Three, Number Five of Dime Pulp,
A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine. 

This issue of Dime Pulp, the Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine is exclusively devoted to Better Than Dead, A Detective Story, featuring private detective Lackland Ask, aka Stan Gardner, aka Sam Carter, on the run again when he learns that his bucolic hideaway in the Three Lakes area is also where his nemesis, mob boss Yan Kovic, aka Mr. K, is ducking the feds. Now it is even more imperative that he make himself scarce, especially after a crooked local constable in league with Mr. K’s hoods try to finish him off. In the meantime, thanks to the moonshiner’s daughter and a lusty cousin, he learns a surprising revelation about his paternity. And what about those dead girls that keep washing up on the shores of Big Lake? Read more in the extended bonus episodes of Better Than Dead, Dime Pulp’s longest running serial fiction.

Phyllis Huldarsdottir’s steampunk Cheése Stands Alone, and Pierre Anton Taylor’s crime fighting Just Coincidence, will return in the next issue of Dime Pulp.

FYI: Available for readers of Dime Pulp who may have missed a few issues or lost the thread of a serial,  Dime Pulp Yearbook 21, featuring 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,  is joined by Dime Pulp Yearbook 22, featuring the complete pulp Western, On The Road To Las Cruces, continuing episodes of  a detective story, Better Than Dead, the opening chapters of new serial novels, Just Coincidence and Cheése Stands Alone, the short fiction of Hard Boiled Myth and Polka Dot Dress, as well as Dropping A Dime’s pithy pulp observations.  Volume Two’s 10 issues are available for perusal in their entirety by simply clicking on the links in this paragraph or on the menu bar above.

If you’ve made it this far, go ahead and follow the link below to reading entertainment with the serial contents of Volume Three, Number 5

Special Note: Dime Pulp, A Serial Pulp Fiction Magazine has changed its posting schedule from  monthly issues to 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—27

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 IX

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 2, Part 1