There could seemingly never be enough detective fiction magazines. Readers clamored for more hard-hitting action, more flinty-eyed investigators, and more shifty underground mobsters. So another detective pulp was launched, rather late in the game, in March of 1951 when other pulp magazines were closing down. And it hit it off with its reading audience, selling enough copies to remain on newsstands until February of 1958 when the era of pulp magazines was at an end. The magazine was published by Columbia Publications, who had been in the pulp business since the mid-1930s. Some of its other magazine included Crack Detective Stories, Famous Western, Hooded Detective, and Science Fiction Quarterly. Smashing Detective magazine ran a grand total of 33 issues, and provided readers with quarterly (and for two years bi-monthly) issues of murder and mystery. Smashing Detective Stories returns in these vintage pulp tales, reissued for today’s readers in electronic format.
Table of Contents:
Our Feature Novel
The Deadly Diary
by Seven Anderton
Bette Calhoun had to be rubbed out, someone figured, but that someone didn’t know that she’d left a diary. At any rate, Bette’s maid said she did, and that diary was in the hands of Edna Pender!
Complete Novelets
One Skull Too Many
by Jonathan Craig
Jeff Harper couldn’t have committed suicide — yet, someone saw him jump.
Die Tomorrow, Please
by Buck Gilmore
How could I solve a murder that hadn’t taken place yet?
Short Stories and Features
Spotlight On Crime
by Tom Thursday
First Aid For Murder
by Bramley Fox
Dr. Mahlon Steele was fascinated by one little inconsistency...
One Dumb Cop
by Richard Blister
He was too dumb to be blustered out of doing his duty, that is...
The Body In My Bed
by William F. Schwartz
I’d taken her to my apartment, all right — but why had I killed her?
An Assist From Archibald
by David James
Police departments on both sides of the pond will be relieved that this is fiction.
