Pulp International - Hugh+Callingham+Wheeler

Oct 5 2020

They also do crap in the garden, do shed on my dresses, and do tongue-lash their own buttholes then lick my face. What was I thinking?

Some folks are dog people, while others are not. We love dogs. But we'd never own one, for some of the reasons noted above. Add to those dubious qualities the fact that they do find corpses. At least in this case. Written by the duo of Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler under the pseudonym Jonathan Stagge, The Dogs Do Bark is an English style mystery set in the U.S., and deals with events set into motion when a decapitated and disarmed body is discovered down a hole by a bunch of one percenters and their hounds out hunting foxes. This found trunk is later identified by a man whose daughter is missing, and the mystery that follows is as gruesome as its intro. It was immediately obvious that the father—an overbearingly pious type who spews Bible verses and declares that his Jezebel of a daughter has come to her inevitable end—might be wrong in his identification, and that's a narrative problem, but whatever, even if the central conundrum wasn't interesting, the story's gory aspects were (add to the list of doggie behaviors that they do eat severed arms). We gather that Stagge's tales were often shocking, so for that reason alone they may be worth another glance. We're always interested in a bit of gore. Originally published in 1936 as Murder Gone to Earth, this Popular Library edition appeared in 1951.

Vintage Pulp

Nov 1 2010

Is that blood? Do you care at all about my carpet and how hard that is to— Well, I guess you probably don't.

Samuel Cherry cover art for Q. Patrick’s Cottage Sinister, originally published in 1933 with this Popular Library edition coming in 1951. Patrick is yet another one of those pseudonyms for multiple authors. Writing under that name—as well as the names Patrick Quentin, Quentin Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge—was a quartet of authors consisting of Hugh Callingham Wheeler, Richard Wilson Webb, Martha Mott Kelly, and Mary Louise White Aswell. We know. This pulp stuff gets really complicated sometimes.