Dime Detective Magazine

According to the mummy movies that I've seen (and trust me, I've seen quite a few), reviving some cloth wrapped living corpse was achieved via boiling up some Tana leaves and getting the bandaged one to sip some of the brew, or by reading the sacred words from an ancient scroll.  But, according to the cover of the March 1933 edition of Dime Detective Magazine, there was a third way: blood transfusions.  As ever with these old pulp covers, a young woman in a state of partial undress is apparently also essential for the process of revivification. It isn't clear from the cover painting, though, whether the blood about to be pumped into that mummy is the girl's, or whether she's there for another purpose.  Note what appears to be one cup of a brass brassiere over her left breast, seemingly connected by a cable to the other cup, which is over the mummy's left breast.  Is the idea to somehow use her heartbeat to kick start that of the mummy, so that it can pump all that lovely fresh blood through its desiccated veins?  I'm also not clear as to the gender of the mummy - if female, could it be that the girl is a present day reincarnation?  (Reincarnation is a persistent theme in mummy movies and stories, despite the fact that it wasn't part of the Ancient Egyptian belief system).

The cover, obviously, is illustrating 'Blood for the Mummy' by Brent North (not the parliamentary constituency of Barry Gardiner MP, but a pulp writer about whom I can find no information, leading me to suspect that it was a 'house name' used by several different authors).  Dime Detective Magazine was published by Popular Publications and was a companion to their Dime Mystery Stories pulp.  Immensely popular, it published some 274 issues between 1931 and 1953.  This issue comes from its most prolific period, when it went to a twice-monthly publication schedule, which lasted until 1935, after which it reverted to being a monthly.  In its final years, it dropped to a bi-monthly schedule.  With ts garish women-in-peril covers and lurid story titles, Dime Detective Magazine was very much the archetypal cheap pulp magazine, eschewing sophistication and literary pretensions in favour of crude thrills.  That said, later issues featured early stories from the likes of John D McDonald.  As this particular cover indicates, it wasn't afraid to encroach upon the subject matter of the horror and weird pulps, particularly during this twice-monthly period, when it was running through content at twice the usual pace.  So there you have it - another reminder of pop culture past.