'Drop Dead, Daddio'

One of a number of late fifties and early sixties detective magazines which specialised in teasing potential readers with bondage-themed covers featuring cleavage-flashing women being tied up or chained, Two-Fisted Detective Stories featured often crudely written stories with catchpenny titles unrelated to their content.  While it did sometimes feature writers with recognisable names - some issues had stories by Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg and Talmage Powell - most were attributed to writers whose work seemed largely confined to magazines of this type.  Indeed, this August 1960 issue boasts a whole slate of such authors: Art Crockett, Al James, Don Unatin and Jay Richards.  It is entirely possible that some, if not all, of these were 'house names', floating pseudonyms used by a variety of authors across the publisher's magazines.  (To be fair, Art Crockett, at least, seems to have had a life outside of magazines, having several 'true crime' books attributed to them).  Certainly, all of these names could also be found contributing to the similar Web Detective Stories around the same time.

The use of house names was common place in this period, often used to disguise the fact that only one or two writers had produced virtually an entire issue of a magazine between them.  (The aforementioned Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg, both now better remembered as science fiction authors, were prolific producers for pulp magazines of all genres in the fifties, using multiple house names).  A house name could also be used to disguise the fact that a series of stories was, in fact, being produced by multiple authors rather than a single person.  In this respect.'Peter Saxon', is one of the best known examples, originally having been used by W, Howard Baker on the fifties and sixties 'Sexton Blake' series for Amalgamated Press, (while he wrote the majority of entries in this series, the house name also covered entries by other contributors).  When Baker moved to Mayflower, he took the name with him, where it was used both on his own books, but also on those of other house authors.  Most notably, it was used on the novel The Disorientated Man, actually written by Stephen Frances, which was the basis of the film Scream and Scream Again.  A subsequent series of supernatural novels, 'The Guardians', was also attributed to the fictional Saxon, but actually the work of multiple authors, (the style notably varies enormously from novel to novel).

Getting back to Two-Fisted Detective Stories, it ran for ten issues or so in 1959-60.  In the eighties, the title was revived for a new magazine which lasted only two issues.  Nowadays, the original version has sufficient rarity value that copies can sometimes command relatively high prices.