The Carnival of Death
A Case of Killer Drugs and Cold-blooded Murder on the Midway

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 carn......more

This book collects two stories from the early part of Hubbard's pulp career, the title story from the November, 1934, issue of Popular Detective magazine, and The Death Flyer from the April, 1936, issue of Mystery Novels Magazine. I didn't much care for the badly-dated The Carnival of Death, which i......more

This is about a series of murders at a carnival. Fortunately, a private detective is there, hoping to solve a reported dope smuggling case. The corpses were beheaded and there are lots of action sequences (including ones at a haunted house and mirror maze). This is probably my least favorite of the H......more

Two stories: "Carnival of Death" and "The Death Flyer." Both are wildly different examples of pulp fiction. The first is a quick-and-dirty two-fisted detective story, written fast and on the cheap with all the exclamation points, plot holes, and questionable sentiments one might expect from pulp of......more

L. Ron Hubbard wrote hundreds of these potboilers. Not great literature, by any means, they are time capsules of American idioms of the 1930's and 40's. They're the literary equivalent of WAMU's Big Broadcast on Sunday evenings, loaded with tough-guy jargon and purple prose. I like them, and they ar......more