Harrigan's file Book

Piece of shit!
"Tex" Harrigan is about the dumbest reporter there ever was. People bring him all sorts of interesting stories about time travel, space aliens, monster, Martians and similar ilk and he never believes any of it. Never. He's not above putting it in the paper if it sells, but he never believes it himself.

This volume purports to bring all of Derleth's sf writing together in one volume. Thank God he didn't write any more. The shtick is for Chicago reporter "Tex" Harrigan to provide the framing story, sort of like Dunsany's Jorkens club stories, to reminisce about some outlandish occurrence in the past as a seed for the plot. The stories are about as tedious and unimaginative as any pulp sf dreck ever dredged up. I know that in the pulp days, and these are later pulp sf stories, they wrote fast for money.

This book was issued just a few years after Derleth's untimely death so it was probably cobbled together when Arkham House was going through a certain amount of disarray. It might also have been something on Derleth's plate when he passed. In any case these stories are better off forgotten in the crumbling pages of the obscure magazines they originally appeared in than they are collected in this book.