Secret Agent "X" – The Complete Series, Volume 1

Introduction Tom Johnson

SECRET AGENT “X” was the ultimate spy! No one knew his name or face, and he only had one contact in government, a mysterious individual known as K-9. Only one woman was ever really close to him, Betty Dale, and she had seen his face just once. But she loved him, and often assisted him in dangerous investigations. “X” was the unknown factor, and criminals beware!

I first found Secret Agent “X” when my father was in the Dallas VA Hospital awaiting his death. I was stationed in California in 1972, and drove into Dallas to visit my father for the last time. I had been collecting Doc Savage and The Shadow for several years, and even picked up a number of pulps out in Los Angeles earlier. Leaving the hospital for a while, I visited an older used bookstore in downtown Dallas, and was surprised to see thousands of science fiction pulps stacked on the floor throughout the building. I mentioned to the owner that I was really looking for the hero stuff, like Doc and The Shadow. He said, “Oh, those are upstairs, but nothing under two dollars. And first issues are four bucks! But I don’t have any Shadows or Doc Savages.”

He took me upstairs, and left me alone in a single room the size of the whole downstairs, filled with pulps and comic books from the 1930s and ’40s. I swear, I thought I had died and gone to pulp heaven! Being in the military at the time, I didn’t have a lot of money, so I had to be careful how much I spent that day. The owner was wrong, though. I did find one Shadow. If I had had more time, I might have found more, maybe even a Doc or two. But time and money were both short.

I want you to use your imagination for a minute. Just think about going through stack after stack of pulp magazines, and finding so many beautiful gems that your heart skips a beat every few seconds. You find Operator #5, The Black Hood, G-8, Masked Detective, Black Book Detective (with the Black Bat), Captain Future, G-Men (with Dan Fowler), Public Enemy, and The Lone Eagle. And comic books that I hadn’t seen since the 1940s! Glorious covers, exciting titles, and I had to leave them all there!

I selected about fifty Phantom Detectives, all from the 1930s, many issues of The Ghost/Green Ghost (including a first issue), that one Shadow issue (“Isle of Death”), and a dozen Secret Agent “X” issues! This was my first real pulp collection. And it took me some time to read all those wonderful old stories, but I finally got through them. And I was fascinated with the character of Secret Agent “X”!

I had to return to California before my father died, but I returned to Dallas later and went back to that old store with money in my pocket. Unfortunately, this time the upstairs had been pretty well picked over. The comics and most of the pulps were gone. I picked up a few issues of G-Men Detective, and some other stuff, but was disappointed that I had missed the opportunity to go through those pulps one more time. The store later closed. I suspect the old gentleman had passed on. I can imagine some descendant tossing the books in a dumpster in the alley afterwards.

I began reading the “X” series and taking notes. Back then, there was very little known about any of the pulp heroes, except for Doc Savage and The Shadow. I also started looking through ads for missing issues for my collection. I paid four dollars for the second issue, coverless, from a book dealer somewhere. I was closing in on my set by the 1975 PulpCon, and I had asked Jack Irwin (I believe) to bring any “X” issues he had for sale, and let me look at them. He did, and I completed my set at that convention. However, those last few issues cost me something like $60.00 each! The prices had risen since interest for the lesser-known pulps were becoming greater.

It was prior to the convention that Will Murray contacted me. He had heard that I was researching the “X” series, and wanted to share data. I began sending him synopses of the stories, and my notes, and thoughts, and Will started adding two and two together, coming up with little known facts and data from his sources. After the convention, we put the history of the series together and sent it to Robert Weinberg for his Pulp Classics series. It remained in Robert’s hands until 1980, when it was finally published — missing a number of pages. An updated version was finally published by Altus Press in 2007, The Secret Agent “X” Companion, complete with the previously-missing pages, and more professional binding.

Today, everyone is familiar with the character, and there’s not much that isn’t known about the series. But everything being said seems to stem from the research that Will and I did in the book so many years ago. And because of that early research, new writers are churning out new stories about the character that may not have ever read one of the original novels. Will originally identified the rewritten Captain Hazzard novel as one of the “X” stories as far back as the early 1970s, but lately I’ve seen mention of someone else identifying the novel. Sorry folks, credit belongs to Will Murray.

Secret Agent “X,” an enigma to the underworld, his face a mystery, ready to lay his life down for his country. This was the character I first encountered back in 1972. I have heard that this was one of the early influences of Ian Fleming when he created James Bond! Notorious gangster Al Capone loved the pulp crime fighters like Secret Agent “X” and Dan Fowler.

The stories that you will find in this first volume are the ones that set the pace for the rest of the series. Although the authors will change from time to time, the editorial control will keep the stories on a fairly even path, just alternating the theme from time to time. There is a possibility that Paul Chadwick, the originator of the series, may have brought in a few ghosts in the early stages, but if so, he certainly went over their work and gave the final stories his own touch. It is only later that the publisher begins to bring in their writers to supplement Chadwick’s stories, eventually replacing him completely. I think you will find the series as fascinating as I did back in 1972.

Happy reading!

Tom Johnson

Seymour, Texas

August 8, 2007