The Suicide Squad/Secret 6 by Emile C. Tepperman

Most readers today, when they think of “The Suicide Squad”, think of the supervillain team appearing in DC Comics, first launched in 1959.  But long before that, in the late 1930s and 40s, a different sort of Suicide Squad was published by Ace G-Man Stories.

A total of 22 stories featuring the surviving three members of the team, Dan Murdoch, Johnny Kerrigan, and Stephen Klaw, saw print and this volume includes six of them, including their very first story, “Mr. Zero and the FBI Suicide Squad”. These three men are FBI agents but have skirted the edges of their authority a time or two in the past and so have been brought together to take on cases so dangerous that they are unlikely to survive.  While all three agents have equal rank, Steve Klaw tends to be the protagonist in all of the stories and certainly gets the most scenes.

This is good ol’ fashioned G-men pulp, with bad guys bullying their way to power and innocent citizens in peril.  Only the Suicide Squad can stop them because it takes their brand of fearless and even eager gun-play to win the day.  The stories are fast-paced and exciting and certainly got my blood pumping with mental pictures of tommy-guns blazing, punches thrown, dames with questionable loyalties, and diabolical villains in need of stopping.

Emile C. Tepperman had a lengthy career as an author of pulp stories, most notably for the Purple Invasion Series for Operator 5, but he also wrote a number of Spider novels, Secret Agent X stories as well as these Suicide Squad stories for Ace G-Man Magazine.  I have two more volumes of Suicide Squad stories on my shelf but am also eager to read some of his other stuff too.