Leland Gustavson pulp illo - Blue Book 12/39 - "The Elusive General" by William J. Makin

This past week, I picked up several interiors from Blue Book Magazine by one of their regular interior artists, Leland Gustavson. Here's one of them -- from the December 1939 issue, for William J. Makin's "The Elusive General". This was one of Makin's tales about Paul Rodgers, known as The Red Wolf of Arabia, a British intelligence officer operating in the Middle East, based loosely on Lawrence of Arabia. I'm not aware of any other pulp doing this, but in the 1930's and 1940's, Blue Book often ran an illustration on the inside front cover. With the better paper stock, those illustrations reproduced better. This was one of them, though as printed in the magazine the blue was replaced with red.

Gustavson was born in Chicago, and began his illustration art career there, though he moved to NYC in 1931 and began working for the pulps. While there, he studied with Harvey Dunn. Like many of Gustavson's pulp illos, for his canvas on this he used what appears to be thin window shade material.