"Murder's Migrants," published three years later, gives us a different Jim Anthony: more the man-about-town amateur detective than the scientist adventurer. In this yarn, crafted by veteran pulpster Robert Leslie Bellem (his name would later pop up as a writer on the original Perry Mason teleseries) and Willis Todhunter Ballard, our hero has to track down the mind behind a vicious scheme to undermine wartime industry. Trucking unemployed workers out into the middle of the southwest desert with the promise of factory work - then leaving 'em to die - these fifth columnists aim to sully Anthony's name as a good decent wartime capitalist. Complicating the story is an obese blackmailing publisher named L. Gabriel Stope, a Caspar Guttman-styled figure who may or may not have the writers' not-so-sly slam at their publishers.
"Migrants" is plain "grown-up" detective fiction, though most readers will almost immediately identify the guilty party. Pilot Tom Gentry also shows up, the only cast member to have apparently survived the change in focus, only here his primary function is to ogle pretty girls and serve the occasional cocktail. The action is less exotic in "Migrants" - no faux "sea serpents" or sinister Hindus, just gunfights with Nazi agents - though our hero's Commanche heritage gets name-checked once again.
If Jim Anthony never became a pulp superstar, the problem wasn't just his appearance at the tag end of the pulp hero boom. Compared to an over-the-top boy scout like Doc Savage or a sinister adventure like the Shadow, Anthony comes across pretty bland. In "Robots," all of the engaging character work gets handled by his underlings. Tom Gentry's jealousy, sparked by his unsuccessful attempts at wooing new Anthony employee Linda Tabor of Tall Corn, Iowa, provides a major plot point - once again demonstrating how much trouble girls are in the boyish world of hero pulps. In "Migrants," a bickering crew of road-show Maltese Falconers provides all the character coloration.
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