RARA-AVIS: The Wandreis

DOUGLAS GREENE (dgreene@odu.edu)
Tue, 16 Sep 1997 09:38:08 EST > WhoAEs this Howard Wandrei guy? IAEve stumbled across his name a few times
> lately. It seems he was some pulpster whose work appeared in Detective
> Fiction Weekly, Black Mask, Spicy Detective, etc., and that he had a
> series character called Ivy Frost. ThatAEs all I know. An ad for a
> collection of his short stories makes him sound like hot shit. Was he? I
> canAEt seem to find anything else out about him.

Kevin, There were two Wandrei brothers, Donald and Howard. Donald
was well-known in the 30's for his sci-fi, fantasy and horror work in
the pulps, and with August derleth he founded Arkham House around
1937 to collect Lovecraft's work. Donald is the one who wrote the
Frost stories. Fedogan & Bremer has announced a collection called
simply FROST for later this year. Howard Wandrei was less prolific
and less-well-known. He too published in several pulp genres. Some
of his detective stuff was collected by Fedogan & Bremer in 1996 as
THE LAST PIN, and they plan to follow this year with another volume
called DON'T SEND A BOY.

Around 1987, Sam Goldstein's small press, Winds of the World, issued
a series of booklets, each containing 3 stories from SPICY DETECTIVE.
Among them was SPICY DETECTIVE ENCORES NO. 3, with 3 tales by
"Robert A. Garron," a pseudonym for Howard Wandrei,

The SPICY DETECTIVE ENCORES series also included booklets by E.
Hoffmann Price, Robert Leslie Bellem, and Hugh B. Cave.

Speaking of Cave, who at the age of 87 is one of the last of the
great pulpsters still active, Tattered Pages Press in Chicago has
released a collection of Cave's SPICY stories, ESCAPADES OF THE EEL,
photographically reproduced from the original pulp magazines. The
Eel was sometimes an adventurer, sometimes a "gentleman private eye."

Doug
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