Pulp Fiction, 1941 · page 25 of 116
10-Story Detective, March 1941 — page 25: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page Analysis This is an interior story page from a pulp magazine featuring prose fiction by Ernest Johnson titled "Pass-Key to the Morgue." The page shows the opening of a crime story about a character named Kane, an athletic man whose legitimate pastime is sports but whose actual business is crime. The visible text describes Kane playing a competitive and aggressive beach ball game at an athletic club pool, where he demonstrates both athletic prowess and callous contempt for other swimmers, deliberately kicking one member and striking another with the ball. A sidebar teases that Kane combines athletics with criminal activity through a dangerous "gun game."
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
- Pass-Key to the Morgue HE beach ball zipped across the pale green surface of the athletic club pool with rocket speed. Kane made a leaping sidewise plunge, his long arm outstretched, his hand cupped. Immediately three members dived, came up about him, trapping him. Kane feinted, shifted swiftly to the left, whirled over and over and under, eluding his opponents. He dived the remaining length of the one hundred and twenty foot pool and emerged, cold and unsmiling, with the ball. Kane grimaced sourly. If he felt any emotion at his prowess, it did 23 By Ernest Johnson Kane’s pastime was ath- letics—but his business was crime. And when he | attempted to combine ij; business with pleasure. he played a gun game that had a suicide goal. |i P not show in his reddish black eyes. Only the twist of his thin lips ex- pressed the contempt he felt for the awkwardness of the others. This applied especially to the fat member who was bending forward grasping his stomach which Kane _ had con- trived to give a vicious kick as he dived. With a sudden turn of his wrist, he sent the ball skimming to the other end of the pool, and chuckled as it struck the fat member in the mouth. The fat member, one hand grasping his stomach and the other his mouth, started for the ladder. COM! Ghook CO