Jim Anthony - Super-Detective: The Complete Series Volume 1

Jim Anthony: Super-Detective #1

by Victor Rousseau Emanuel, Will Murray (Introduction), Matthew Moring (Designer)

Another complete series collection from Altus Press, this time focusing on the classic Doc Savage clone Jim Anthony, complete and uncut from the pages of the Super-Detective pulp magazine from 1940-43. Volume 1 contains the first three adventures, collecting the Rado Ruric trilogy: "Dealer in Death," "Legion of Robots" and "Madame Murder." These also include editor notes and correspondence, and this edition contains an all-new introduction by Will Murray.

390 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2009

About the author

Victor Rousseau Emanuel (Avigdor Rousseau Emanuel) was a writer of pulp fiction who was active in Great Britain and the United States in the first half of the 20th century. He wrote under the pen names Victor Rousseau, V.R. Emanuel, H.M. Egbert and Lew Merrill.

After an early career as a reporter for the New York World and as an editor of Harper's Weekly, he became a fiction writer. He wrote in a variety of genres, including historical fiction, frontier stories, western romance and crime fiction, but was probably best known as an early exponent of science fiction and fantasy. His best known novels in those genres were The Messiah of the Cylinder, a story of a man placed in suspended animation for 100 years, and The Eye of Balamok, a lost-race novel. Several of his stories were adapted for Western films, and he was the author of one silent film screenplay, The Devil's Tower, based on one of his stories.

He also wrote at least the first three and possibly the first fifteen or so "Jim Anthony, Super Detective" novels. Jim Anthony was a short-lived pulp hero created in imitation of Doc Savage.

Reviews

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the entire first story, "Dealer in Death," through to its conclusion, which was not merely melodramatic but absolutely operatic both in motives and body count. This, after an awful lot of plodding detail in the first 16 chapters, laced with adoring mentions of Jim Anthony's superlative brain and body--the latter disappointingly undetailed. (One must make do with the gorgeous series covers, available online.)

It turns out I can stand only so much pulp. I'm definitely not going to go through another two like that. This volume will have to slump on its Kindle virtual shelf owned but 2/3 unread.