The Caroussos, Part 3: Costa -- Garbo

 In Part One and Part Two of this series, we looked briefly at the work of writers Dorothee and Georges Carousso. Both of those blog posts are fairly brief and sparse. It was surprisingly difficult to hunt up info about this husband and wife, though both had their work published in a number of places. I didn't really intend to do a Part 3, but then I got some hits while internet searching and, being who I am, once the clues started popping up, Ihad to try to solve the mystery.

 Georges Carousso was an editor as well as an author, and while doing research for last week's essay, I discovered that there had been someone from the same era named Costa Carousso who was also an editor and author.  Costa Carousso, I found out after a little online searching,  specialized in the genre we now call The Weird.

With so little information available to me,  I started out with one small speculation -- that Costa might have been an older brother, as his publication credits showed up a few few years before Georges' dates of publication. Then I was thrown off-track by a used-books website offering a vintage crime mag. The issue had an author list which included the name "Costa Carousso Vandergrift."  Hmm. Was"Vandergrift" an added married name? That would make Costa a sister to Geoerges, rather than a brother.

But no. The haze cleared away when I lucked into a post on a Facebook group about pulp fiction. This included a very readable recollection from writer Frederik Pohl about his early days as a writer and pulp magazine edito. Pohl worked with "a young fellow" named Costa Carousso. Well, that settled that. Now I could assume the Vandergrift thing was just a typo in the crime mag author listing. 

Here are some excerpts from Frederik Pohl's little memoir piece:

 So the next time I went to see Robert Frisman, who was then the editor of a short-lived pulp called Marvel Science Stories, I got up the nerve to ask him if he could use an assistant. He couldn't. But he took pity on me and told me he'd heard that Popular Publications, down at the far Eastern end of 42nd Street, was looking to hire some new editors, and why didn't I just apply?

The offices of Popular Publications were on the top floor of the Bartholomew Building... just off Third Avenue. The main entrance was at 205 East 42nd Street, but the building went straight through the block and there was another entrance at 210 East 43rd. Crafty Harry Steeger took advantage of this geographical fact when he observed with alarm the growing morass of half-cent-a-word pulps that were invading the field (Popular Publications had always proudly paid the full penny a word), and decided to fight fire with fire. This he did by incorporating a new, low-budget company he called Fictioneers, Inc. He used the 43rd Street address to disguise its identity...

[Down the hall were] .. another bunch of assistants. (One of them was a young fellow named Costa Carousso, who was hired the same week I was. Costa made me realize how lucky I had been. My starting salary was only ten dollars a week, which was very little, but Steeger had hired Costa at notthing at all; it was three months before he was raised to ten dollars a week.)

It took me most of an afternoon to get this far in finding out who Costa Carousso was, or at least what he'd written or edited. I picked up the investigation the next day, and after considerable time spent adding and combining names and words to go into the Google search box, I came across another reference to Costa Carousso, this time in a book called The Shudder Pulps.

 

From there, I was able to find various vintage magazine dealers offering pulp magazines with Costa's byline in them. I saw that the author/editor worked not just in the genre of weird fiction, but also wrote for detective and mystery magazines, and even mags full of Western tales. 

 

 

 

Costa Carousso was a frequent contributor to Dime Detective.  I found a couple of Costa's tales at Internet Archive, because IA has a couple of compilations which paid for or otherwise obtained permission to reprint stories from Dime Detective. Thus you, readers, can peruse some of Costa's stuff online if you like. (To view the anthologies where the stories are collected, one has to sign up for free with Internet Archive. You just provide an email and then choose a password.)

 This is where where you can find "Mine Host -- The Ghost," in 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories.

And here's a tale called "The Queen of Corpses," which was collected in 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories.

 

And that's all the background I could easily track down about Costa Carousso. It's even less than I know about Georges, whatever relation he was to Costa.. Georges' wife Dorothee, as we learned in the first post on the Carousso family, wrote a memoir-ish novel, which made her name pop up a bit more often than the other two writers. It helped a lot that one of Dorothee Carousso's stories was adapted for television. So I guess that's the moral of this three-part story: if you writers want to be remembered, try and get your stuff on TV.