The two L. Ron Hubbard pulp stories from the 1930s in this collection are quite fun. The first has Detective Bob Clark working undercover at Shreve’s Mammoth Carnival to expose a dope ring. What he finds is a carnival barker’s headless corpse, and discovers that some headhunters from one of the carnival’s sideshows have broken out. Or were they let loose? Does the gruesome scene tie into the dope ring? It’s pretty fun finding out, and there is a ton of action in this whiz-bang style pulp story that is very Norvell Page-like in both pacing and presentation. It moves so fast there’s no time to be bored, and there is plenty of seedy carnival atmosphere — pulp style, nothing deeper — to augment the fights and chases and headless bodies. As if that weren’t enough, there are some fun illustrations of the action along the way. If I have a caveat for this one, it’s only that it moves so quickly that there is barely time to enjoy the atmosphere, so it’s a minor one.

For this reader, it is the second story which is the real gem! Since I can’t describe how good it is without giving a bit away, please read no further if you have an aversion to SPOILERS! In The Death Flyer a man is walking along some old train tracks on the anniversary of a flyer’s wreck, and suddenly on this lonely night he is swept onto the train from the past. The train is filled with ghosts, including a pretty girl in red who appears to know him. Unlike the others, who attack him and desire to throw him off the train, she has been expecting him! There is a wonderful little ending which suggests he might be riding the Death Flyer over and over, until he gets it right!

While this is nothing more than pulp, I found these two short stories to be great fun. My review is for the Kindle edition. ( )

I got this for free at a conference ages ago. It features a foreword by Kevin J. Anderson, two stories by L. Ron Hubbard ("The Carnival of Death" and "The Death Flyer" - both of which are accompanied by black and white illustrations), a brief preview of Hubbard's "Mouthpiece," a glossary of 1930s and 1940s words and expression used in the stories, and a 9-page overview of L. Ron Hubbard's writing life (nothing negative, and not a single mention of Scientology).

Kevin J. Anderson's foreword had nothing but glowing praise for pulp fiction, which I suppose would have been fine if it hadn't been for the implication that pulp fiction of the 1930s and 1940s was better and more enjoyable than most fiction published today. "These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work" (x-xi). That kid and adult are almost certainly white and male, and their "good clean entertainment" has a high concentration of violence and death.

I'd probably have disliked "The Carnival of Death" regardless, but Anderson's foreword certainly didn't help.

"The Carnival of Death"

The longest of the two stories, at almost 70 pages. Bob Clark has been hired as a carnival detective, tasked with investigating a cocaine smuggling ring operating somewhere within the carnival. His work is complicated by the discovery of a decapitated body - the barker who oversaw four captive African headhunters (later specified to be Nigerians). The headhunters are gone, and the initial assumption is that they escaped and killed their captor, but Clark isn't so sure. A little hair left behind at the crime scene leads him to think that the true culprit is a white man who freed the headhunters as a diversion.

This was almost purely action, and it wasn't even very good action. Clark would do a tiny bit of investigating, get attacked or otherwise get in a fight, and then do a little more investigating. It seemed odd to me that Clark kept thinking the blond guy had something to do with the decapitated body when the text specifically referred to the hair he found as "white" rather than "blond," but I'm guessing readers weren't supposed to be thinking about things like that.

Granted, I only have this story and "The Death Flyer" to go off of, but I wonder if any of the women in Hubbard's pulp fiction stories were ever referred to as "women"? I'm guessing only if they were older and/or unattractive. The one in this story was always a "girl." Meanwhile, the young man who I assumed was probably about the same age as her was either "the blond youth" or "the man called Jack."

The Nigerian headhunter aspect was painfully dated, and I cringed every time they were mentioned, which thankfully wasn't quite as much as I expected. Not a single character in this story saw any problems with four Black people held captive and put on display for a white audience (incidentally, Anderson's fawning foreword didn't discuss pulp fiction's handling of race at all).

"The Death Flyer"

A civil engineer named Jim Bellamy is walking along a train track back to his camp one evening, cursing himself for being out so late, when he almost gets run over by a train. The conductor pulls over and offers him a ride, which he accepts, only to discover that he's stepped into a strange, spooky, and probably dangerous situation.

This little ghost story was actually sort of okay, at least in comparison to "The Carnival of Death." Granted, trains can't just casually pull over to take on random passengers, but the supernatural element makes me slightly more willing to let than one slide.

There wasn't much to it - the whole thing was only 20 or so pages. It was a little confusing, and it featured yet another instance of a young woman who I assume was at least in her twenties being referred to as a "girl." I've read and watched better supernatural train stories. Still, it wasn't bad.

Overall, this book wasn't for me, and I have no intention of reading more of Hubbard's works.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )

I liked The Carnival of Death and was surprised with how few pages as this author tends to write tomes! If you know the author, you'll know he writes stories from the 40's and 50's, I liked US narcotics agent Bob Clark with his "Bogey" style as he fought to find the killer in the carnival and the dope smuggler using the carnival for evil. I loved that there was teasing short stories to wet my appetite for more. ( )

This is a fun audio tape. I received this audio book as a part of the Library Thing Earlier Reviewer and my wife and I listened to it over dinner. There are background sounds and numerous actors playing the parts --just like in the old radio days radio shows. Some of the dialogue is dated and even a little politically incorrect for today's tastes - but if you take it with a grain of salt then you will enjoy this story. It involves a circus carnival and thieves, thugs and murderers, as well as a hero and heroine. In the end, probably a bit too sophomoric for most people. I reviewed this earlier but for some reason Library thing did not record it as reviewed. so here is my second review. not much has changed between the 2.

This was so totally out of the realm of what I normally read. It was an audiobook and they presented it like an old time radio show. It was so hokey, it was fun! A cheesy mystery that you really wanted to solve with the detective. I'm most likely going to try some others in this series.

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. ( )