Scientific Detective Monthly
Scientific Detective Monthly was a pulp magazine that published fifteen issues beginning in January 1930. It was launched by Hugo Gernsback as part of his second venture into science-fiction magazine publishing. Many of the stories involved contemporary science without any imaginative elements. The title was changed to Amazing Detective Tales with the June 1930 issue, perhaps to avoid the word’scientific’
About Scientific Detective Monthly in brief
Scientific Detective Monthly was a pulp magazine that published fifteen issues beginning in January 1930. It was launched by Hugo Gernsback as part of his second venture into science-fiction magazine publishing. Many of the stories involved contemporary science without any imaginative elements. The title was changed to Amazing Detective Tales with the June 1930 issue, perhaps to avoid the word’scientific’ It was sold to publisher Wallace Bamber, who produced at least five more issues in 1931 under the title Amazing Detective Stories. By the end of the 19th century, stories that were centered on scientific inventions and set in the future, in the tradition of Jules Verne, were appearing regularly in popular fiction magazines. The first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, was launched in 1926 by Gern’sback at the height of the pulp magazine era, but in February 1929 he lost control of the publisher when it went bankrupt. In the middle of the year he launched three new magazines: a non-sf magazine titled Radio Craft, and two sf pulps titled Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories.
At the same time, he merged Science Wonder stories and AirWonder Stories into Science Wonder Quarterly. In February 1930, an article by GERNsback appeared in Writers’ Digest titled “How to Write ‘Science’ Stories”. In it, he offered advice on how to write stories for his new magazine, claiming that scientific detective stories represented the future of the genre, and that the ordinary gangster and detective story will be relegated into the background in a very few years. He intended Scientific Detective Monthly to be a detective magazine in which the stories had a scientific background; it would entertain, but also instruct. The appearance of the magazine was part of a resurgence of popularity in the subgenre at the end-of-the 1920s. The magazine was closed down with the October issue. It is likely that the same reasoning that the word Scientific was put off some potential readers, who assumed that it was a sort of scientific periodical, rather than a magazine intended to entertain. It has been suggested that this was the reason for the magazine’s name change.
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This page is based on the article Scientific Detective Monthly published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
