Fred MacIsaac

Unless you really know pulp, you may be unfamiliar with the name Fred MacIsaac. Though he belonged to the million-words-a-year club, and was widely respected, his stories weren’t quite viewed on the same tier as Gardner, Burroughs and the few others in his class. Today, some of his stuff holds up better than their early pulp stories, however, proving just how good he was. It was his omission from Penzler’s Big Book of Pulps, along with those of Norvell Page and Robert Bellem, which forced me to rate that one less highly than I might have otherwise. MacIsaac wrote everything from fantastic fiction to tales of adventure and crime. All of his stories were solid.

MacIsaac, a big tall redhead, had covered the waterfront as a reporter in Boston, then he moved into the police reporter beat. Finally he became a drama critic. When he finally got his break, and cracked into the prestigious Argosy, there was never any looking back. He was incredibly prolific during the Great Depression, providing inexpensive but solid entertainment that made people forget about their sad plight for just a little while.

Frank Gruber, of The Pulp Jungle fame, was a huge fan. Related in the introduction by Ed Hulse is Gruber’s account of lunch with MacIsaac. It becomes very poignant once you learn that MacIsaac had dried up creatively by then, and hadn’t been able to sell a story for a long while. Sometime later, MacIsaac’s life would end in the most tragic way possible...

The afterward to the collection contains a Meet Mr. MacIsaac piece that he wrote, where MacIsaac explains his background, and why he moved around so much. Though obviously written as a magazine piece, it’s quite interesting, especially when you realize that his most famous creation, the Rambler, is basically a carbon copy of MacIsaac the man, and writer.

Like MacIsaac, Frank Murphy (the Rambler) was a newsman. He also was tall and had red hair, and shared MacIsaac’s wanderlust. The Rambler’s reputation as a great newsman followed him from town to town, enabling him to get a job as soon as he hopped from the boxcar he’d ridden in on — often literally. A big story always collided with his arrival, and when things got rough, the Rambler could take it on the chin with the best of them. Though there was always a girl in there somewhere, the Rambler inevitably had to leave her behind, his wandering nature too strong to overcome. It’s too bad, because it might have been nice had the Rambler found a kindred soul, a newsgirl with whom he could share his adventures as they tramped from town to town. Hmm…there’s a story there somewhere…

Cosmetically, this is a nice, heavy trade paperback. It has some marvelous — I really loved them — illustrations by John Fleming Gould to accompany the Rambler stories. The cover art is terrific, suggestive of those great pulp art covers. Even the back cover is nice to look at, with the six original pulp magazine covers where these stories first appeared on display. This one is from Altus Press in Boston, and they did a wonderful, high quality job, which is what MacIsaac deserves. It’s printed on white, good stock paper — no flimsy stuff — and has a nice font. My only minor caveat in this department is that the font is somewhat small. It might have been nice if it were just a tad larger, but it’s still easily readable.

The meat, of course, is the story, and all six of these are very good:

THE AFFAIR AT CAMP LAUREL — Argosy Magazine, October 8 Issue, 1932

ALIAS MR. SMITH — Dime Detective Magazine, April 1 Issue, 1933

GHOST CITY SET-UP — Dime Detective Magazine, September 1 Issue, 1933

GO-BETWEEN — Dime Detective Magazine, June 1 Issue, 1933

MURDER REEL — Dime Detective Magazine, August 15 Issue, 1934

HEIR COOLED — Dime Detective Magazine, June 15 Issue, 1935

I enjoyed all of these stories. They are well written, entertaining, and hold up well as good pulp stories after all these decades. I was tempted to leave a very solid four star rating on this one, but I’m going to give it that last star. Maybe the knock on MacIsaac was that he was "only" good, rather than memorable. Perhaps he was a rung down on the ladder from the very top echelon, but when a guy has this many good stories in a genre, and they are still fun to read this many decades after they were written, maybe it’s fair to start using the word Great where MacIsaac is concerned. Like Fletcher Flora, who came along later, consistently good is its own form of greatness. Yes, maybe it’s time…… (meer)