Edna Pender
Created by Sven Anderton (-1958)

Sven Anderton's EDNA PENDER was a female P.I. from the pulps (imagine the ill-bred bastard child of Honey West and Mike Hammer), who appeared in severa tales in Famous Detective Stories from 1951 to1954. Given the tenor of the times, it's no surprise Edna was kown for her big breasts, tight clothes and her skill with a gun--she tends to aim for the knee or the ear, or sometimes the place "where it really feels." OUCH!

Backing her play, and presumably keeping on her good side, was her faithful sidekick Steve Ware.

Sven Anderton wrote for some other pulps, as well. In fact, for a guy I first figured was a house name at Columbia Publications old Seven Anderton really got around. He had a bunch of stories in Argosy circa late 1920s into the 1930s, and from that I learned that he left home early and hoboed around, rode with Pancho Villa, was bad into drink before a woman became his wife and he sobered up. Not mentioned was his term in prison which respectable sources tell me he was serving when he published his first story.

UNDER OATH

• "All I can say is Wow! This is the toughest broad I've yet discovered in pulp fiction. She is a female Mike Hammer. No lie. Steve Ware is her partner in St. Louis and is the first person narrator but he was never really much of a success until he hooked up with Edna Pender and he knows it. We see the story through his eyes but this is not an equal partnership. Ware does what Edna tells him and hangs on for dear life.
  .
  This is the real deal. I am a collector...well maybe an accumulator is more like it. I own thousands of old mags and I buy still more... digging through them and sometimes wondering what drives me to do so. Here is the reason. It is finding, totally unexpectedly, a gem of a story and a writer I never heard of who just may have authored other little wonders that might be in that next mag I buy."
  (Richard Moore)

THE EVIDENCE

• "Miss Pender looked like the second coming of something that should have stayed away the first time. She was small, bow-legged, and thin---except at the bust. What she had there would have aroused the envy of any Hollywood sweater-girl. Her features were nice--if considered singly--but they didn't match; the face was grotesque, except when she smiled."
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• "By gawd..."there ought to be a law against a female being that ugly."
  (from "Hot Ice House-Warming")
  

SHORT STORIES

• "Hot Ice House-Warming" (February 1952, Famous Detective Stories)

Thanks to Juri Nummelin for the lead, and Richard Moore for the legwork..

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