Once a Pulp Man: The Secret Life of Judson P. Philips as Hugh Pentecost

Once a Pulp Man

The Secret Life of Judson P. Philips as Hugh Pentecost

Audrey Parente

Published by Bold Venture Press

www.boldventurepress.com

Cover design: Rich Harvey

"Once a Pulp Man:

The Secret Life of Judson P. Philips as Hugh Pentecost"

by Audrey Parente

Copyright 2016 by Audrey Parente. All Rights Reserved.

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder. All persons, places and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

License Notes

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Preface

Chapter 1 — Where did the pulp man go?

Chapter 2 — Who was the Lonely Boy?

Chapter 3 — Hugh Pentecost rises

Chapter 4 — Will the real, real Judson Philips please, please sign in?

Chapter 5 — Women troubles: The Loss of Hope

Chapter 6 — The Playhouse

Chapter 7 — The editors

Chapter 8 — The series characters

Chapter 9 — On foreign reprints and translations

Chapter 10 — The newspaper

Chapter 11 — The rest of the story

Chapter 12 — Bibliography of Judson P. Philips

Chapter 13 — An interesting prequel

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Connect with Bold Venture Press

Introduction

by Bernard A. Drew

It takes hard work, practice, diligence and persistence to become a successful fiction writer — and natural talent doesn’t hurt. By several measures, Judson P. Philips was a successful fiction writer. How he pursued his career is fascinating and illustrative of a particular period in American literary history.

It’s more difficult to become established as a successful mystery writer today than when Philips did, as there are few break-in opportunities.

There’s no magazine market, Philips told me in 1979. "It has disappeared except for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock and a couple of others. Long time ago, there were a lot of markets for mysteries, American magazine, Liberty, the old Saturday Evening Post. Those markets don’t exist anymore."

Many genre fiction writers honed their craft on short stories.

The best chance today seems to be with the novel, the full-length story, he said.

Arthur Conan Doyle collected his Strand stories about Sherlock Holmes for book publication. But moving up wasn’t easy for everyone. Literary periodicals a century and a quarter ago may have had high images of themselves, but only a few nurtured enduring authors. At the other end of the spectrum, Mildred Wirt Benson, who wrote the first Nancy Drew mysteries as Carolyn Keene, was locked to a juvenile readership. Dime novelists had little opportunity to move into more enduring formats — Old Sleuth or A New York Detective didn’t even have names to establish identities with their readers.

With the pre-World War I advent of the pulp magazine format— named for the newsprint on which they were printed — Frank A. Munsey, Street & Smith, Popular Publications and other publishers recognized that readers would come back for more if the publications gave editorial attention to promising writers.

There were dozens and dozens of pulp titles published between the wars, some weekly, some monthly or quarterly. Some lasted more than 100 issues (The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Spider), some floundered after one or two (Zeppelin Stories). Some struck particularly high notes (Black Mask, Weird Tales), others are best forgotten (Spicy Mystery Stories). They paid a penny or two a word, more for the better-established writers.

Judson P. Philips, you will learn as you read Audrey Parente’s Once A Pulpman, found regular markets with Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Detective story Magazine and other mystery pulps.

His rule of thumb was simple: Where there’s success, be imitative. Latch onto something that’s done real well and copy it. This has always been true. It’s easy to find an example; Philips’ Park Avenue Hunt Club series owed its roots to Edgar Wallace’s three-decades-earlier Four Just Men.

Writers climbed the ladder from the pulps: Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Robert E. Howard (barely), Louis L’Amour, A.E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon. They all thrived as book writers. Some sprang into the dazzling world of scripting Hollywood films, Frank Gruber and Richard Sale among them. The next generation found homes with book publishers after starting out with the 1950s digest magazines — shrunken pulps, really. Ed McBain. Lawrence Block. Donald. E. Westlake. Bill Pronzini.

Philips showed himself particularly adept at working interesting settings or trades into his prose, quickly rose up the literary food chain to mass circulation magazines. He had modest name recognition. Fellow pulp writer Lester Dent, on the other hand, wrote scads of Doc Savage adventures under the Street & Smith house alias Kenneth Robeson. But the name Dent meant nothing to readers. When Philips needed a second byline, Hugh Pentecost, to carry some of the load, he had no obstacle.

Walter B. Gibson, alias Maxwell Grant, chronicler of The Shadow pulps, had the same problem as Dent, but found ample work ghost writing magician autobiographies. Bill Severn, who excelled at cowboy romances, later produced juvenile non-fiction and books about magic tricks. Herman Petersen graduated from Black Mask to hardcover mysteries. Anthony M. Rud took his Jigger Masters detective of the bizarre from the pulps to hardcovers. I mention these authors in particular because I was able to interview them or family members for introductory material for a six-issue run of a modest fanzine I called Attic Revivals (1979-1983). Severn lived in the same town I do, Great Barrington, Mass., and is the only male romance writer I’ve ever interviewed. Gibson was a little more than an hour away near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and loved to tell stories. Rud’s son was a one-time co-worker and friend. Petersen’s son, who lived in hops country in New York state, still had his father’s story submission file.

Jud Philips lived just over the border in Canaan Valley, part of North Canaan, Conn., and was greatly bemused by my interest in the old days. I featured his 1934 Park Avenue Hunt Club story The Hawk in the first issue of my publication. I included one of his Ivy Trask stories — with a rare woman lead character — in a hardcover anthology for St. Martin’s Press, Hard-Boiled Dames (1986). Years later, he had a chapter in a literary history of the Berkshires I wrote in 2015.

A more subliminal connection with Philips came when I joined the staff of The Lakeville Journal in 1996. I’m an associate editor and front-page designer for the same weekly to which Philips for years contributed a column. I didn’t expect I’d end up working regularly for the newspaper when as a freelancer in December 1979 I helped Philips introduce his latest book, and newest alias. He wrote Mystery at a Country Inn on commission from Norman T. Simpson of Berkshire Traveller Press in Stockbridge, Mass. His regular publishers would have frowned if he’d used either of his regular bylines. So he became Philip Owen. He did his research at the White Hart in Lakeville.

I enjoyed a couple of meals there and at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, he confided. If I do the research, if I know what I’m writing about, people will recognize the effort. They’ll feel closer to the work.

I work in the same village (Lakeville) in which Philips’ series character (under the Pentecost byline) Uncle George Crowder practiced law (Lakeview). One of the books (Death by Fire) was based on the very real arson fire that destroyed the town hall

in Salisbury, Conn. These days I sometimes drive to work along the same stretch of road the writer appropriated for his eerily prescient short story (and later novel) The Day the Children Vanished.

You don’t have to be in Philips/Pentecost/Owen territory to enjoy the writer’s books. In fact, I have a fondness for Death Delivers a Postcard (1939), in which Carole Trevor plays an unexpected private eye, having been given Old Town Detective Agency as part of a divorce settlement by her ex, Broadway playboy Maxwell Blythe. The action is on Long Island. It’s Philips doing what Philips does well, taking a sure thing — a spin on Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles — and giving it his own twist. Barely had I finished reading the book, I searched out its predecessor, The Death Syndicate (1938).

Philips and many of his generation of writers weren’t so much pulp writers as writers who found stepping stones in the pulps. Other facets of this man’s fascinating life and career await you. Read on.

— Bernard A. Drew

Bernard A. Drew is a weekly newspaper editor and columnist, popular literature reference book writer and local historian.

Preface

by Audrey Parente

I knew Judson P. Philips as the writer behind the pen name Hugh Pentecost, an energetic personality who owned a summer stock theater in Connecticut. He was a creative, prolific, humorous, cheerful, cynical, flirtatious dynamo. He liked good food, great theater, a healthy debate, strong-willed women and good tobacco.

But things were different when he answered the phone 20 years later and I asked if I could write his biography. He didn’t have the same stage voice, but a gravel, raspy tone.

He politely remembered me as the long-haired blonde he hired to be assistant to his business manager from the playhouse days, and added: Well, girl, if you’re going to write about me, you’d better hurry-up, he barked.

He was severely stricken with emphysema. He was very ill. But he was still writing at least a couple of pages each day.

I spent time in person with Jud for a few weeks before the holidays in 1988, and then three days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve culling through card files, contracts and letters in New York at the office of his agent Carl. D. Brandt, son of old Carl Brandt who founded the agency Brandt & Brandt in 1912 with his brother Erdmann.

Brandt & Brandt represented numerous authors during the 20th Century, including Booth Tarkington, Joseph Conrad, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Raymond Chandler.

The office is on an upper floor in the historic Paramount Building, a 33-story skyscraper in the Times Square neighborhood of Manhattan—it was designated a New York City Landmark the year I visited. The pilgrimage up the elevator, trekking down a long white hallway to the door at the end gave meaning to ivory tower.

Older Carl Brandt worked personally with Judson Philips. Erdmann left the firm in 1934 to become editor of Saturday Evening Post. But by then Carol Brandt, Carl’s second wife had joined the firm. Carl Junior came up through the ranks and became the hands-on manager of the prolific Philips. The firm’s old files are now held at Princeton University Library. The agency, now Brandt & Hochman, still represents Philips’ interest for Philips’ heirs.

At Judson Philips’ home in 1988, the talented author gave me a peek at the depth of his ability to laugh at himself, and at life and death.

The author readily debunked any glamour associated with his occupation.

There’s a lot of fakery among writers, he said. They like to make it seem romantic. It’s no different than any other job. It may require more discipline than other professions, but it’s still a job.

Lucia Warren was the name of Philips’ heiress character in his first novel under the pen name Hugh Pentecost, Cancelled in Red. By description, she was tall and dark-haired, and she wore a little black hat with a veil that came down to the bridge of her nose.

She had a half-length mink coat which she had thrown back against the one worn, comfortable looking leather armchair. The room was furnished with a battered desk, littered with papers and books, and more books lined the walls.

When I got to Judson Philips’ home, I stood only 5-foot-2, my hair was long and blonde. My hat was black but had no veil. My thrift-store vintage fur was much cheaper than Lucia Warren’s. The armchair and the room described in Pentecost’s first story could have been the same one where I sat across from Philips on a particularly icy New England afternoon.

Philips was lying on a daybed, plugged into oxygen to ease his chest-wheezing emphysema. His faithful long-eared, shiny-coated pet hound, Huckleberry, rested near his feet on a multi-colored wool afghan. Philips had just suffered a phlegm-rattling coughing jag.

We sat pondering his situation as we worked through a difficult interview which lasted nearly four hours. Philips had been telling me of his five marriages. Not far away, Norma Philips, Jud’s wife, at that point of 37 years, was preparing coffee. (Jud’s I bet, despite his emphysema, would have a little something added to make it stronger than mine.)

So, Jud, I said finally, is it safe for me to say you were a ladies’ man?

Still is, chimed Norma, in her best stage voice, as she brought in two cups.

Jud’s laughter lapsed into another coughing spasm, so we sat quietly sipping from our cups for another little while.

Norma Burton Philips was once a Broadway actress. I saw her in a stunning portrayal of the lead in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Sharon Playhouse, an equity theater owned by her husband.

Norma disappeared back into the kitchen.

Satisfied he was safely through his coughing jag, and after sipping with some satisfaction from the dregs in his mug, Philips unwrapped a Christmas gift that arrived in the mail from his daughter Caroline, one of his four children, but from an earlier marriage. The gift brought a smile and a few more, quiet, thoughtful moments.

I’d like to give you a copy of my latest book, Philips offered.

Oh, no, I lied, not unless, of course, you’d care to autograph it.

He chuckled. Norma came in from the kitchen with the book and chuckled. I grinned.

While he was signing, I readied to leave. Visualize me brushing back a strand of long blonde hair, looking up at Hugh Pentecost, guilt-ridden and glassy eyed as I positioned my black-brimmed chapeau….awaiting his handing me the addict-book-collector’s fix.

When Philips finished the inscription, I moved closer to him, glanced briefly at Norma, then kissed his cheek.

Philips glanced at Norma, turned to me, opened his arms and said, Will you marry me!

During our visits, I collected enough material to begin research, reading and preparing to write Judson Philips’ biography and include a pretty thorough bibliography.

We stayed in touch by snail-mail and long-distance telephone landline for two months. Jud died in March 1989.

I continued with the project and planned to meet a contracted publication date of 1995 with Ted Dikty of Starmont House, Mercer Island, Washington.

My work on Philips’ biography included: interviews with actors, producers and directors who used Philips’ summer stock theater as a springboard for their careers. I corresponded with numerous family members, friends, former pulp writers and publishers. I took shorthand and recorded several long-distance phone calls, trying to reach everyone suggested by Philips and his agent—anyone who had any connections to Judson Philips or Hugh Pentecost.

For example in 1991, I recorded phone interviews with renowned actors Bradford Dillman and Jane Alexander who were ingénues at Sharon Playhouse in the 1950s. Jane Alexander also suggested I try to reach Richard Jordan and told me how to reach him at a theater in New York where he was performing. I left a message, but he never returned the call. I learned later he was stricken ill and ultimately died from a brain tumor. I regret I didn’t reach him in time for his memories of Jud and Sharon Playhouse summer stock for this book.

The plan was for Philips’ biography to publish in 1995, following my biography of Hugh B. Cave (published by Starmont House, 1988) and one I was in the process of writing at the same time as my interview with Jud, about Theodore Roscoe (published by Starmont House, 1992).

Shortly before the Roscoe book was published, owner of Starmont House, Ted Dikty, died. Shortly after my Roscoe bio reached a very poor-quality print in ’92, Roscoe also died.

I was ready to write the Philips biography, but my Starmont House book remainders and the remaining contract for my Philips’ bio were sold to Borgo Press, a California company that didn’t last.

About the same time Borgo disappeared, I was a single mom with two sons and had just launched my full time journalism career with The Daytona Beach News-Journal. I didn’t have time for my pulp hobby or for tracking down another publisher.

I had an amazing and fortunate 20-year stint as a reporter with the independently owned newspaper. The publication gave me the opportunity, budget and encouragement to do real journalism when news pages were bedsheets and people read them cover to cover.

My focus on the newspaper work paid off—with a Pulitzer nomination for my front page and double-truck package on our government’s use of depleted uranium in our armor and ordnance. There were several investigative reporting and feature writing awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Florida Press Association. I acquired fans and produced a formidable body of work, with stories often picked up by the Associated Press and duplicated with permission by local and television reporters. I also had work printed in Russia when I represented our country there while spending my vacation time in the Citizens Democracy Corps.

I never wrote the Philips book but saved quite a bit of the Philips-related research in a box. I had collected and read more than half of Philips’ books and a smattering of his pulp stories, including some Park Avenue Hunt Club stories thanks to E. P. Digges La Touche.

After my retirement in 2012, I relocated and sold almost everything I owned including all of my books and pulps—and kept only my bed, some of my clothes and the box of Philips-related research materials (and the bound excerpts of the Park Avenue Hunt club stories which I promised to someday return to La Touche).

I rejoined the pulp collectors at a gathering in New Jersey in November 2012 where I found a new direction, and along the way new encouragement to return to this project. With the Internet, it wasn’t difficult to track down a few new sources, but most of the pre-existing ones seem all to have passed away.

One person I discovered via the Internet was Sue Lawless, a retired, award-winning Broadway director who was an ingénue actress at the Sharon Playhouse during the two summers I was there.

A return to the Brandt Agency’s Broadway office, now Brandt & Hochman, led to meeting up with Jud Philip’s son Daniel Philips. Dan lives less than an hour away from my retirement condo in South Florida.

Kismet, for sure!

Thanks to Daniel Philips and his agent Marianne Merola at Brandt & Hochman, Bold Venture Press will now be reprinting some of Judson Philips’/Hugh Pentecost’s works—beginning with The Lacquer Box by Judson Philips in Pulp Adventures #20 and the book, Cancelled in Red, via which Judson P. Philips became Hugh Pentecost. The story behind that is very revealing about publishing industry insiders.

With thanks to the entire pulp fiction community, to my sons Peter and David who have always given me purpose, and to the generous caring of Richard William Harvey IV, you will read in these pages about the pulp fiction industry through the experiences of a prolific mystery writer who insisted he was a