Books & Authors: A Blog About Readers Advisory and What You Should Read Next

There's a long history of pulp fiction, long before Tarantino and Travolta got a hold of it.

By Clair Lamb – Pulp fiction. n. (Americanism). Fiction dealing with lurid or sensational subjects, often printed on rough, low-quality paper manufactured from wood pulp.

Before it was a Quentin Tarantino movie, “pulp fiction” was its own literary phenomenon, although “literary” might be overstating the case. The low-priced magazines and paperbacks made stories available to the masses, on cheap yellow stock that wasn’t expected to outlast its readers. The pulp magazines of the 1930s and ’40s, followed by dime novels in the ’40s and ’50s, covered the spectrum from science fiction to Westerns, with a little bit of everything in between: adventure, hard-boiled detective novels, horror, and the racy stories euphemistically called “men’s fiction.” In the days before television and Internet, pulp fiction offered the average American an escape into worlds they’d never experience, whether it was the Old West or a space colony.

Pulp fiction started as short stories and moved into novels, launching authors who later became known in more legitimate literary circles: Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Donald Westlake. These authors were paid by the word, in sums that required vast quantities just to earn a living wage. And they produced: the so-called “king of the pulps,” Robert E. Howard, is reported to have written an average of 5,000 words a day, seven days a week, in the mid-1930s.

Across genres, pulp fiction had several recurring elements: a strong central character, usually male; an exotic setting, whether geographic or situational; love interests that offered danger as well as the possibility of pleasure; and non-stop action, portrayed so vividly that an earlier generation had called these “sensation” stories.

Pulp fiction’s popularity began to wane in the late 1940s, for reasons that included the return of soldiers from the Second World War (and later Korea) to the routine of family life and the introduction of television. But the stories survived, and paperback publishers such as Ace, Dell and Avon — which had started as publishers of pulp magazines — continued to bring readers books from authors such as Louis L’Amour, Lawrence Block, Donald Hamilton, Elmore Leonard, and John D. MacDonald.

A respectable percentage of these books have survived to become acknowledged classics, to be reprinted in more durable editions for new audiences. Black Lizard, a publishing imprint founded in 1984 by author Barry Gifford (himself a pulp author, best known for the Sailor and Lula series), reprinted dozens of overlooked or forgotten pulp fiction titles; its successor imprint, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, has kept the works of pulp icons Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes in print, among others. In 2003 The Feminist Press of the City University of New York launched “Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp,” to reprint classics written by the tiny number of female pulp authors: Faith Baldwin, Vera Caspary, and Dorothy B. Hughes, among others.

Choke Hold, published by Hard Case Crime

In recent years, however, the pulp fiction flag has been carried highest and proudest by Hard Case Crime, an imprint founded in 2004 by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips, and dedicated, according to its website, “to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills — the sheer entertainment — of the golden age of paperback crime novels.” Ardai, previously best known as the founder of Juno Online Services, and Phillips were among the imprint’s first authors (Ardai under the pen name Richard Aleas), but Hard Case Crime’s first title, in September 2004, was Grifter’s Game, a reprint of a Lawrence Block novel originally published by Gold Medal in 1961 as Mona. After that, Hard Case published between 10 and 13 titles a year, a combination of new fiction and reprints, often from surprising sources.

Hard Case’s October 2005 release, The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, remains its bestselling title, but the list also includes Straight Cut by Southern literary novelist Madison Smartt Bell; Mickey Spillane’s last novel, Dead Street; and The Dead Man’s Brother, the first new work from legendary science fiction author Roger Zelazny in 15 years. All of its titles have covers that pay homage to the classics of pulp fiction, showcasing illustrators and painters such as Richard B. Farrell, Gregory Manchess, and the legendary Robert McGinness, who created the posters for the original Sean Connery James Bond movies and for the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three Hard Case novels have won national awards: Domenic Stansberry’s The Confession won the 2005 Edgar for Best Paperback Original, Max Phillips’s Fade to Blonde won that year’s Shamus Award for Best Paperback, and Richard Aleas’s Songs of Innocence received the Shamus Award for Best Paperback of 2007. [click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }