METAL v. FLESH!

Hunted by machine-men and betrayed by science, one father and son hold the only key to humanity’s survival.

Can flesh and blood outwit Atrakin, the immortal metal tyrant who would rule the universe?

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Super Science Stories was a pulp science fiction magazine first published in March 1940 by Popular Publications, a company well-known for its wide range of pulp titles. The magazine was created at the request of Doubleday’s paperback line, which needed a steady flow of science fiction content for reprints in their Better Little Books series.

Edited by the legendary Donald A. Wollheim in its early years, the magazine offered space opera, adventure tales, and speculative stories from both established writers and new voices in the genre. Though not as prestigious as Astounding Science Fiction, it gained a loyal readership thanks to its fast-paced storytelling and willingness to feature up-and-coming authors.

The magazine’s initial run lasted from 1940 until 1943, when wartime paper shortages forced Popular Publications to suspend it. It was revived in 1949 and ran under the same publisher until 1951, with a brief final return from 1959 to 1960 under Feature Publications.

Across these periods, Super Science Stories played an important role in shaping the pulp science fiction landscape, offering early publication opportunities to writers such as Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, and Isaac Asimov. Although never considered a top-tier title, its mix of bold cover art and sensational, action-oriented stories captured the adventurous spirit of mid-20th-century science fiction.

FRIGHT HITS A NEW HEIGHT!

People rise screaming into the night sky until their bodies are engulfed in horrendous fiery explosions, as a masked mastermind terrifies a city with unimaginable murders.

Only Edward V. King stands between the killers and their next victim—but even he may be too late.

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Strange Detective Mysteries was a pulp magazine published by Popular Publications beginning in 1938, during a period when publishers were experimenting with blending established genres. As its title suggests, the magazine specialized in combining hardboiled detective stories with elements of the bizarre, the supernatural, and the horrific.

This positioned it alongside the “weird menace” and horror pulps, but with a stronger emphasis on mystery and investigation. Readers could expect tales of private eyes and policemen pitted not only against criminals, but also against eerie conspiracies, occult trappings, and seemingly impossible crimes. This hybrid style made the magazine distinctive at a time when crime and horror pulps were booming.

Like many Popular Publications titles, Strange Detective Mysteries relied heavily on eye-catching, lurid covers to grab attention at the newsstand. Often painted by leading pulp artists, the covers depicted terrified women, grotesque villains, and dramatic confrontations meant to suggest both horror and action. Inside, stories leaned on atmosphere as much as action, with plots often involving cults, sinister scientists, or unearthly threats that pushed detective heroes to their limits.

Though the magazine did not run as long as more conventional detective pulps, it carved out a niche in pulp history as one of the more unusual experiments in cross-genre storytelling. Today, it is remembered fondly by collectors and pulp historians as a title that embodied the pulps’ willingness to blur lines and chase thrills wherever they could be found.

FRIGHT HITS A NEW HEIGHT!

People rise screaming into the night sky until their bodies are engulfed in horrendous fiery explosions, as a masked mastermind terrifies a city with unimaginable murders.

Only Edward V. King stands between the killers and their next victim—but even he may be too late.

from

Strange Detective Mysteries was a pulp magazine published by Popular Publications beginning in 1938, during a period when publishers were experimenting with blending established genres. As its title suggests, the magazine specialized in combining hardboiled detective stories with elements of the bizarre, the supernatural, and the horrific.

This positioned it alongside the “weird menace” and horror pulps, but with a stronger emphasis on mystery and investigation. Readers could expect tales of private eyes and policemen pitted not only against criminals, but also against eerie conspiracies, occult trappings, and seemingly impossible crimes. This hybrid style made the magazine distinctive at a time when crime and horror pulps were booming.

Like many Popular Publications titles, Strange Detective Mysteries relied heavily on eye-catching, lurid covers to grab attention at the newsstand. Often painted by leading pulp artists, the covers depicted terrified women, grotesque villains, and dramatic confrontations meant to suggest both horror and action. Inside, stories leaned on atmosphere as much as action, with plots often involving cults, sinister scientists, or unearthly threats that pushed detective heroes to their limits.

Though the magazine did not run as long as more conventional detective pulps, it carved out a niche in pulp history as one of the more unusual experiments in cross-genre storytelling. Today, it is remembered fondly by collectors and pulp historians as a title that embodied the pulps’ willingness to blur lines and chase thrills wherever they could be found.

PURPLE GODS! CRISS-CROSS DEATH!

When two Secret Service agents are hurled onto the uncharted island of Perambi, they find more than fever jungles and volcanic fire—they crash headlong into a nightmare of purple-painted gods, savage rites of sacrifice, and the whispering menace of the Cave of the Criss-Cross Knives!

Against a backdrop of blood-soaked altars, vanished natives, and a traitor who rules like a mad deity, they must fight not only for their mission, but for their very sanity, as every shadow promises treachery, and every kiss may be the prelude to a knife thrust

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The Spicy line of pulp magazines was launched in the mid-1930s by Harry Donenfeld’s Culture Publications, a company that specialized in pushing the boundaries of what pulps could get away with under the law. These titles included Spicy Detective Stories, Spicy Mystery Stories, Spicy Adventure Stories, and Spicy Western Stories.

On the surface, they were part of the usual pulp genres—crime, horror, adventure, and westerns—but what set them apart was their heavy emphasis on risqué content. The stories featured scantily clad women, salacious situations, and often a blend of sex and violence that shocked critics but attracted a steady audience. Covers were particularly notorious, usually depicting women in peril with lurid, suggestive artwork designed to make the magazines leap off the newsstand.

The Spicy magazines gained notoriety for skating just under the line of obscenity laws, becoming some of the most controversial pulps of their time. While they weren’t pornographic by modern standards, their mix of titillation and pulp thrills was provocative enough to draw the ire of moral reformers and eventually the U.S. Post Office, which cracked down on their distribution.

By the early 1940s, the titles were forced to tone down their content, dropping “Spicy” from their names and shifting toward tamer fare. Despite their decline, the Spicy line left an enduring mark on pulp history, remembered as both a daring publishing experiment and a key moment in the ongoing tug-of-war between popular entertainment and censorship in America.

THREE MEN—ONE BIG PROBLEM

Tawny March thought juggling a Marine and a Soldier was trouble enough—until a wrong number brought a Navy man with eyes like storm-tossed seas!

Now three uniforms, two proposals, and one sizzling secret threaten to set her heart—and her future—on fire!

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All-Story Love was a pulp romance magazine published by the Munsey Company, one of the pioneering giants of the pulp era. It debuted in 1921, during the boom years when publishers were experimenting with specialized pulps to target particular audiences. While Munsey had already made its mark with The Argosy and All-Story Weekly, All-Story Love was part of its expansion into genre-specific markets, alongside titles devoted to westerns, adventures, and detective tales.

The magazine focused squarely on romance stories, offering melodramatic plots filled with passion, heartbreak, betrayal, and redemption. Unlike the broader pulps that mixed genres, All-Story Love catered specifically to women readers, which was still a relatively novel idea in pulp publishing at the time.

The magazine ran through the 1930s, with changing editorial approaches as tastes evolved. In its early years, All-Story Love presented dramatic, almost gothic romance tales, but later it shifted toward lighter “love-conquers-all” narratives that mirrored popular Hollywood romances. Cover art played a crucial role in its appeal, often featuring glamorous young women in moments of emotional intensity, designed to catch the eye on crowded newsstands.

Although it never achieved the enduring fame of adventure-oriented pulps, All-Story Love is significant for helping establish romance as a viable pulp genre. It paved the way for the later explosion of love pulps and, eventually, the mass-market paperback romance novels that would dominate mid-20th century popular fiction.

TWO MEN. ONE TRAIL

Under the punishing blaze of midday, Sheriff Coale rides south, his resolve set and his guns gleaming—tracking the Baxters’ faint trail as promised.

But he’s not alone. Rixey, his deputy a former commanding officer, rides alongside, their uneasy alliance tested by dust, sweat, and the unspoken tensions that flare hotter than the noon sun. Every hoofbeat pushes them deeper into danger, where survival demands more than grit: it demands trust, even as rivalry and old scores simmer beneath the surface.

In "Tin Star" by George C. Appell, the chase is more than a manhunt—it’s a battle of wills, where justice and loyalty are as unpredictable as the trail itself.

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Fifteen Western Tales was a pulp magazine published by Popular Publications, first appearing in 1931 and running until 1951. The “fifteen” in its title referred to the promise of fifteen complete western stories in every issue, a marketing hook that gave readers a sense of value for their dime.

Like other Popular Publications titles, Fifteen Western Tales was a classic hard-riding, gun-blazing pulp, delivering action-driven tales filled with cowboys, outlaws, sheriffs, and frontier justice. It was never aimed at highbrow readers but instead at working-class audiences who wanted fast-paced entertainment rooted in the mythic American West.

Over its two-decade run, Fifteen Western Tales became one of the more reliable entries in the western pulp field, which at the time was one of the most dominant genres in pulp publishing. Its covers, often featuring dramatic shootouts, stagecoach chases, or rugged heroes rescuing imperiled heroines, were designed to grab attention on crowded newsstands. The magazine published contributions from both veteran western pulp writers and journeyman authors trying to break into the field, helping maintain the constant demand for new frontier tales.

While the western pulp boom faded in the 1950s with the rise of television and paperback westerns, Fifteen Western Tales remains a representative example of the mass-market western magazine, remembered for its blend of affordability, abundance, and consistent cowboy action.

A NIGHT OF UNIMAGINABLE TERROR

Dare to read this chilling tale of legacy, love, and the shadows that linger in the moonlight.

Step into the ancestral halls of Robert Mercer, where a single October night shatters the boundary between the ordinary and the supernatural.

Haunted by a luminous, faceless apparition and a sudden, unexplainable change within himself, Mercer must confront an unknown terror that threatens his very soul.

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Terror Tales was one of the flagship “weird menace” pulp magazines, first published in 1934 by Popular Publications. It quickly became infamous for its lurid blend of horror, crime, and sadistic thrills, setting the tone for the entire subgenre. The stories usually followed a formula in which seemingly supernatural horrors plagued the protagonists, only to be explained away by the end as the schemes of criminals or madmen.

Despite these rational explanations, the magazine leaned heavily on graphic descriptions of torture, depravity, and bizarre cruelty, which made it both popular with thrill-seeking readers and controversial among critics and reformers.

The magazine was known as much for its sensational covers as for its content. Painted by artists like Rudolph Belarski and John Newton Howitt, the covers typically depicted terrified women in peril—chained, menaced by masked villains, or threatened with gruesome deaths. This imagery was designed to shock and entice newsstand buyers, and it played a major role in cementing the “weird menace” aesthetic.

Terror Tales ran through the late 1930s and into the early 1940s before declining, as public pressure against violent and sexually charged pulp content grew stronger. While short-lived compared to other pulp genres, the magazine remains a notorious example of the extremes of pulp publishing, remembered today for its mix of horror, exploitation, and high-octane sensationalism.

BEFORE THERE WAS SAM SPADE

Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op starts with a seemingly routine hit-and-run investigation—but nothing is routine in this city’s underworld. What begins as a straightforward case spirals into a tangled web of murder, counterfeiting, and betrayal, all leading to a luxury hotel where three bodies lie in wait and danger lurks in every hallway.

As the Op peels back the layers of deception, he finds himself locked in a high-stakes game with one of the West Coast’s most dangerous criminals—where a single misstep could mean the difference between justice and his own body on the pile. Sharp dialogue, grit, and suspense fuel this noir thriller from start to finish.

This is not just an audiobook version of the short story. Its multi-layered story draws inspiration from Dashiell Hammett’s own rich legacy of detective stories.

The series is not epic in scale, with vast landscapes and multiple points of view. It is a personal story of redemption. The series belongs to The Op. Except in episodes where he recounts the exploits of an associate, The Op is in every scene. The viewer only knows what he knows, what he sees, staying true to the narrative style of the stories. Each case unfolds as it happens. But ultimately, the story is not about the cases The Op works. It is about his inner struggle, which plays out over a three-season span.

On a desolate Jovian moon where criminals toil in radite mines and death lurks in every tunnel, one man’s hatred burns brighter than the stars! The devil overseer Marnick rules with torture and insane laughter—until McGowan, a convict with a vengeance older than the mines themselves, leads a desperate plot of escape, betrayal, and blood.

But when madness meets revenge in the shadows of the detector beams, the line between justice and damnation blurs, and every man must choose whether to die in chains—or kill in cold silence beneath the alien sky!

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Planet Stories was a pulp science fiction magazine published by Fiction House from 1939 to 1955. Aimed at younger readers and adventure fans, it specialized in fast-paced, action-heavy tales set on exotic alien worlds. Its stories leaned toward “space opera,” often filled with interplanetary battles, daring heroes, and glamorous heroines caught up in cosmic intrigue.

Unlike some of the more cerebral science fiction pulps of the era, Planet Stories was unabashedly focused on thrills, romance, and spectacle. This gave it a reputation for colorful escapism, drawing in readers who craved imaginative adventure rather than scientific speculation.

Despite its pulpy style, the magazine attracted contributions from major science fiction authors. Early on, it published writers like Ray Bradbury, Clifford D. Simak, and Leigh Brackett, who would later become known as one of the masters of planetary romance. The artwork, particularly covers by artists like Allen Anderson and Alexander Leydenfrost, was equally important in cementing its identity—vivid, often provocative images of alien landscapes and scantily clad space adventurers became its trademark.

While Planet Stories eventually fell victim to the decline of pulps in the 1950s, it remains fondly remembered as one of the most influential titles in shaping the “space opera” tradition and fueling the imaginations of science fiction fans during the Golden Age.

A HARDBOILED SLEUTH IN TINSELTOWN

Experience the intrigue and spectacle of “BULLET FROM NOWHERE,” where Hollywood illusion collides with the legend of Mata Hari in a daring scene too provocative for American censors.

Step onto the set and witness secrets, artistry, and danger unfold beneath the studio lights.

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Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective was a pulp magazine that spun out of the immense popularity of Robert Leslie Bellem’s hardboiled character, Dan Turner. The title ran from 1942 to 1950, published by Culture Publications, and specialized in breezy, slang-filled detective yarns set against the glitzy but seedy backdrop of Hollywood. Turner was a wisecracking private eye who mixed tough talk with a relentless eye for trouble, often embroiled in cases that blended murder, scandal, and sensational showbiz intrigue.

The stories leaned heavily into colorful language—Turner’s slang-heavy narration was a hallmark—and offered readers a unique mix of crime fiction and satirical takes on Hollywood’s glamour and grime.

The magazine was also notable for its bold and often risqué presentation. Covers frequently depicted glamorous women in compromising or dangerous situations, emphasizing both sex appeal and menace, in keeping with the broader “spicy” pulp tradition. The stories themselves, while formulaic, were fast-paced and heavy on action, with Turner out-talking, out-fighting, and out-charming crooks and femmes fatales alike.

Though the magazine eventually faded with the decline of the pulp market in the early 1950s, Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective remains a memorable part of pulp history, representing the collision of hardboiled detective fiction with Hollywood excess, all delivered with a wink, a wisecrack, and a smoking gun.