About 90 years ago, the July 25th weekly issue of the crime and detection pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly offered up a fair amount of entertaining stories, some purportedly true.

T. T. Flynn’s The Garroters of Ghost Cove, the issue’s novelette, is a fast-paced story in which protagonist Bob Riley, breaking into an apartment, discovers a hanged man and also a young woman who has her own interest in the apartment dweller’s safe. When circumstances make it appear to the police that Riley killed the man in the apartment, he heads out, following a clue he discovered, to try to find the real culprit and also force a crook’s confession to clear his name.

Outlandish but nonetheless entertaining is Erle Stanley Gardner’s “Coffins for Killers,” in which a dilettante adventurer, Señor Arnaz de Lobo (star of more than 20 stories between 1930 and 1934), takes steps to thwart a gang of crooks. Smoothly written, with good action. A wealthy man meets his doom through poison in Edward Dial Torgerson’s “The Monkshood Murder,” but how was the poison administered? And which of the possible suspects actually did it, assuming that the police are wrong in fixing their suspicions on one of the suitors of the victim’s ward. A naïve narrator adds to the interest of this one. The railroad provides the setting for Stanley Day’s “He Who Socks Last,” in which a boomer brakeman eventually wreaks vengeance on a cruel, bullying railroad detective.

Charles Somerville’s “The Loot Ship” tells the true story of how a fugitive swindler is eventually captured. The other true story in the issue is a continuation of “Behind the Green Lights,” by Captain Cornelius W. Willemse, former commander of the First Detective Division of the New York City Police Department; I skipped this, as incomplete, just as I skipped the serial in this issue, Part 4 of Louis Lacy Stevenson’s five-part The Girl in the Desk.

Note: Detective Fiction Weekly had started out in 1924 as Flynn’s, edited by William J. Flynn, former head of the U.S. Secret Service and of the Bureau of Investigation. Though renamed in 1928, it continued to carry “Formerly Flynn’s” on its cover. There were hundreds of issues published in its lengthy run, as it was weekly for around 18 years, and I’ve begun to get them to read when I have the opportunity.