'Mistress of the Dead'

 

Another striking cover image from a pulp magazine, in this case the October 1935 Dime Mystery Magazine.  Illustrating Hugh B Cave's 'Mistress of the Dead', I can't say how accurately the cover painting represents the story, with its vivid depiction of a woman being dragged up a chimney breast by a devil.  The story itself is apparently a tale of voodoo in the swamps.  The interior illustrations for it are somewhat more explicit, albeit in black and white, with a bare breasted woman being carried away by a bunch of zombies.  Titled Dime Mystery Book Magazine for its first ten issues in 1932, Dime Mystery Magazine notched up 144 issues between 1933 and 1949 and another five in 1950, under the title 15 Mystery Stories.  In its early days it was one of the first 'weird-menace' type pulps, specialising in mystery stories with horror elements and an emphasis upon young, semi-naked, women being tied up and menaced.

Over time, in line with changing tastes and the emergence of dedicated horror pulps, Dime Mystery Magazine became more of a conventional crime pulp, still with an emphasis on the weird, but with the bondage and rape overtones of the covers gradually dialed down a few notches.  But back in the early days, it was still proud to boast that it carried 'The Weirdest Stories Ever Told', with a 'Spine-Tingling Mystery-Terror Novel' in every issue.  Like many popular pulps, Dime Mystery Magazine also had both Canadian and UK reprint editions.  Of course, a dime not being slang for any kind of UK currency, the latter issues of the British edition were titles simply Mystery Magazine.  (For what it is worth, under either title it was usually sold in the UK for a shilling, which was worth twelve old pence, or a twentieth of a pound, which was presumably the UK publisher's idea of a British equivalent to a dime, (ten cents or a tenth of a dollar)).