“Men’s Adventure” Debuts Today

January Magazine’s sister blog, The Rap Sheet, today begins publishing Men’s Adventure, “a crime novel in installments,” penned by Dick Adler, the Chicago Tribune’s longtime, Ellen Nehr Award-winning reviewer of mystery and thriller fiction.

This approximately 60,000-word story -- new chapters of which will be posted at The Rap Sheet every Monday over the coming year -- is based in part on Adler’s experiences as an editor at Argosy magazine, a fiction periodical turned “men’s magazine,” which he joined in 1956. That, Adler explains, was back in the days “when Erle Stanley Gardner (of Perry Mason fame) was heading up a section called The Court of Last Resort, which used writers like James T. Farrell (author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy) to help unjustly convicted prisoners.” Adler tells The Rap Sheet:

[I]n this serial novel, “Gardner becomes Perry Marcus, Farrell turns into Saul Cooperman, Argosy transforms itself into Viking,” and his editor-detective protagonist from [his previous novel] The Mozart Code, Ivan Davis, “joins a cast which includes such other real-life people as Harvey Matusow (one of the strangest figures of the Joe McCarthy witch hunt) and writers like Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather while he was churning out stories for the world of pulp magazines.” At the same time as Men’s Adventure introduces readers into the colorful and arcane realm of New York-based pulp publications, it will explore the damage done to so many lives by Senator McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) in his obsessive pursuit of alleged Communists both inside the federal government and without.

You can read the first installment of Men’s Adventure here.