Brilliant, decisive, and hard-charging, Deputy Inspector Allhoff was the NYPD's ace detective until bullets from a mobster's machine gun robbed him of his legs, his career, and-in the opinion of an associate-his sanity. Yet Allhoff was too good a man to be put out to pasture, so New York's police commissioner found a way to keep him employed and refer to him such cases as the department couldn't or wouldn't handle. Confined to a wheelchair and operating from a seedy tenement flat, Allhoff is assisted by two cops: Battersly, the rookie patrolman whose brief moment of cowardice cost the...

Meet the "Rambler" peripatetic newspaper reporter Addison Francis Murphy. A tall, rangy redhead, the Rambler behaves like a tramp, wandering from city to city, often arriving on a railroad boxcar, never taking root. Renowned for his reporting skills and deductive abilities, Frank Murphy never has any difficulty landing a job with the local newspaper; wherever he winds up, he finds that his reputation has preceded him. The Rambler has a knack for getting into trouble, and every search for a front-page scoop puts him in jeopardy sooner or later. He seems to have a genius for running afoul of...

New York-based private investigator Cass Blue is a morally flexible tough guy who backs up his hard-boiled rhetoric with frequent applications of the blackjack he carries in a hip pocket. No case is too seedy or sordid for him to take, and he's capable of taking as much as he dishes out when it's necessary. The cops don't trust him much more than they do the criminals, but that doesn't keep him from giving clients full value for their retainers. With the dubious assistance of speakeasy owner Al Lascoine, Cass sasses and slugs his way through a succession of Depression-era adventures. The Cass...

NYPD Lieutenant Martin Marquis and the officers of his hand-picked Broadway Squad are the toughest, most vicious cops in pulp-fiction history. "The Marquis," as he is called along Manhattan's Main Stem, is trim and dapper, with a weathered face and deep-set blue eyes. In marked contrast to the average plainclothes officer, he dresses like one of New York's "swells," generally showing up at crime scenes clad in smartly angled derby hat, black silk scarf, black kid gloves and shoes, dark suit, and ankle-length black Chesterfield coat. His appearance notwithstanding, the Marquis is practically a...

To habitues of the nation's top racetracks he's known as "The Bland Buddha of the Bangtail Circuit." Less polite players of the ponies call him a tout or a bookie. There's no doubt that Mr. Joe Maddox is a shrewd judge of horseflesh, but he's also a shrewd judge of men. And that's a critically important quality to possess, because Mr. Maddox repeatedly finds himself pitted against crooks and killers whose depredations are linked in some way to the racing game. Assisted by his sidekick Oscar, the heavyset handicapper has always managed to beat the odds, but sooner or later his luck is bound to...

Vivian "Vee" Brown leads two lives. Delicate-looking and small in stature, he lacks physical strength and endurance. But that doesn't prevent him from being an effective special operative to the Manhattan District Attorney. In this capacity he often ignores the legal niceties of due process, shooting first and asking questions later. Many citizens view him as a hair-trigger gunman whose promiscuous killings make him little better than the vicious criminals he hunts. In his other life, Brown lives in a luxurious Park Avenue penthouse, paid for not with his modest civil-servant salary, but with...

The great movie serials of yesteryear are covered in 20 informative essays culled from the pages of BLOOD 'N' THUNDER, the premier journal of adventure, mystery and melodrama in American popular culture of the early 20th century. There are no gushy fanboy puff-pieces in this book; each essay is undergirded with solid research and, in many cases, interviews with the actors, writers and directors involved. Titles covered at length include THE IRON CLAW (1916), PATRIA (1917), THE GREEN ARCHER (1925), THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY (1926), JUNGLE MYSTERY (1932), THE RED RIDER (1934), NEW ADVENTURES OF...

For more than a decade, BLOOD 'N' THUNDER has explored American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as manifested in its mass-market fiction-dime novels, nickel weeklies, pulp magazines-and such complementary storytelling forms as stage melodramas, motion pictures, and Old Time Radio thrillers. The first 21 issues of this award-winning, limited-circulation journal are long out of print, and collectors have been known to pay as much as ten times the original cover price for back numbers that infrequently turn up on eBay. A follow-up to 2011's THE BEST OF BLOOD 'N'...

The motion-picture serial, routinely dismissed, overlooked, or undervalued by mainstream film historians, finally gets the attention it deserves in this meticulously researched and lovingly written book. Drawing on the well-established conventions of pulp fiction and blood-and-thunder stage melodrama, the motion-picture chapter play thrilled viewers of all ages and, more importantly, helped make moviegoing a weekly habit for millions of Americans during the Teens and Twenties. Author and film historian Ed Hulse, the editor of publisher of BLOOD 'N' THUNDER magazine, opens the book with a...