Jim Anthony Pulp Review

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been reading a lot of pulp recently. While I’m not (yet) going to review the “Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective” series (even though I just wish-listed volume 10), I will review some other series I’ve read my way through recently and “Jim Anthony - Super Detective” will go first.

There are currently five new books in that series out from Airship 27, the first volume, though, is only available directly from them. I ran into a little trouble while buying it, but they were very good at solving the problem for me, which makes me want to advertise for them even a little more. Good customer service is a lot rarer than it should be. Anyhow, back to the time between the world wars and to James Anthony.

According to the intro of the first volume of the new series, “A Spicy Savage” by Norman Hamilton, Jim Anthony was originally meant to be a copy of Doc Savage, who is far better known, even today. It’s not wrong to describe Jim the clone as a brilliant superman, who has far too many abilities and too much knowledge to be a ‘realistic’ character. However, pulp doesn’t demand realistic characters, so that is okay. He also differed in character, being more hot-blooded and more interested in women (he was part of a line of ‘spicy’ publications, taking things as far as they could dare erotic-wise at that time, after all). What set him clearly apart from the beginning, however, was his pedigree: Jim was part Irish from his father, but also part Native American (or Indian, as it was still called in the 1940s) from his mother’s side. He had ties to the Comanche tribe through her and his maternal grandfather, who sometimes plays a role in the stories (both of Jim’s parents are dead already, a common affliction of pulp heroes).

While the original Jim Anthony, according to the text mentioned above, seemed to have been caught between being a Doc Savage clone and being toned down to a more realistic detective later on, Airship 27 has established the new Jim Anthony as a crime hunter rather than a crime solver, making good use of Jim’s larger-than-life features and challenging him with villains which are just as much above your regular criminal. As a matter of fact, “The Mask of Terror” (vol. 3 of the series) outright introduces Jim as a crime hunter, mentioning that many of those he goes after don’t survive the hunt.

But before I go into detail about the books, I want to start out with my general impression of the series and what sets it apart from my other binge-read series (review coming up soon) “Secret Agent X.”

The most obvious difference, no matter which of the five books you start with (I started with the aforementioned volume 3), is that X tries to avoid killing, if at all possible. Jim, on the other hand, almost regularly kills those he is after, he pays little heed to leaving the villains or their henchmen alive (even though he will go at great lengths to protect the innocent).

Jim Anthony introduces himself and his world pretty quickly in each volume, so no matter where you start, you will always know quickly who the people around him are (mostly Tom Gentry, Dawkins, and his grandfather). There also is no doubt from the beginning that a lot of things will happen around Jim (but then, most Secret Agent X stories also jump into the action, it’s a pulp staple). He is too ‘larger-than-life’ and too much into adventure to just have a calm evening at home or a normal business trip to a town in Maine.

Jim’s relations with the police - he is, after all, hunting criminals, so he does cross paths with the police regularly - are varied. Sometimes, it’s even the police who approaches him for help, in other volumes, they try to obstruct and stop him at every turn.

Not all of the new stories keep to the fiancé which Jim has acquired in latter stories of his original run, some introduce new characters for him to flirt with or find interesting, but sexual adventures happen, if they happen at all, off screen - despite the fact that it would be much easier to add them these days.

The stories I’ve read so far are usually set in the 1930s, which would be before the original run of the stories, but not necessarily before the original stories. A lot of Airship 27’s novels are set in that era, though, so it’s not as if they stick out. Technology, unless it’s been developed by either Jim or the villain of the book, fits with the time. Writing adventure stories seems to have been a good deal easier in the past, when the world wasn’t as closely connected as it is today with internet, smartphones, and cheap plane tickets.

Jim hunts down a variety of people during the five volumes. He tangles with King Kong in volume 2, “The Hunter.” He goes up against an organisation trying to drown the world in anarchy in volume 3, “The Mask of Terror.” He fights several lesser villains in volume 1 and 4 (which have several novellas each). He goes up against a mastermind hiding behind other masterminds in volume 5, “Jim Anthony vs. Mastermind.”

Depending on who is writing the story, as with all of the Airship 27 series, the quality and the style differ, but on the whole, all of the stories are interesting and well worth the time it takes to read them.

With the distance to the original pulp stories, Jim Anthony has actually gained traction for me. He’s less overshadowed by his original these days, since Doc Savage isn’t all that present today, either. The decision to keep more to the adventurous side and to the larger-than-life personality also was a good idea. It makes the novels something of a ‘superhero comic’ read, which I personally find very, very interesting.

There are surely worse ways to spend an afternoon than to read one of the novels. My favourites, if I have to name them, would be volume 3 and 5, since I’m not much into King Kong and the other two books feature several shorter stories each.