The Pulps

The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines

Peter Haining

larger image   

I saw my first pulp magazines heaped up on a counter in the UK chain store Woolworths in the early 1950s. The brilliant red and yellow covers, with their illustrations of violent action and beautiful girls in various stages of disarray, immediately caught my schoolboy imagination. So, instead of spending my weekly pocket money on sweets and the usual comic, I purchased a copy of a magazine called Weird Tales. I walked home, my head lost in worlds of fantasy and horror, and somehow knew I would never be quite the same again. It would, in fact, be a while before I came to appreciate the uniqueness of these American magazines, shipped across the Atlantic and sold cut price in various outlets such as Woolworths - and a lot longer before I learned about their history. I did soon discover, though, that they were not approved reading by my parents, and any copies of Weird Tales - and another favourite, Black Mask - that I could afford, had to be secreted away for reading by flashlight under the bedclothes. Little did I realise then that there had been teenagers just like me doing exactly the same thing in the United States, a generation earlier.

In the fifty years since then, I have constantly been on the lookout for copies of these remarkable magazines - becoming ever rarer by the year - and now own a quite substantial archive, which has helped to make this book possible. Sadly, my first copy of Weird Tales has long since disappeared (left behind in the loft of one of the family houses when we moved, I believe) but the memory of the magazine, the words, and the pictures, linger on. It was a purchase of the purest chance that opened the doors into the unique world of the pulps. There were hundreds of pulp magazines - gaudy, sensation-packed fiction titles that sold at between five cents and a quarter. Their classic era was from the 1920s to the 1940s, and they catered to basic needs in the male psyche because their market was almost solely focused on the US male: his aspirations to be 'red-blooded' and a 'he-man', and to have a life of action and adventure in which beautiful women fell easily into his arms, and even into his bed. Such dreams came true only for the few, so the pulps catered to fantasies - providing armchair action and masturbatory ideals. As Tony Goodstone, one of the first pulp historians, put it: every month during the 20s, 30s, and 40s, millions of red-blooded American males barricaded themselves behind the bathroom doors of the nation with the latest offerings of their favourite pulp magazine. Proscribed by parents, condemned by educators, and ignored by critics, the pulps were the development of a fiction form rooted in the early nineteenth century, and were, according to the magazine Playboy, "Those likeable lurid novels for which whole forests were levelled and upon which a whole generation of American youth was hair-raised."

The pulps were the young men's magazines of their time - a period of time in the US that was more puritanical, more troubled, and more repressed than it is possible to believe of a nation that so prides itself on its freedoms. Some women did read these magazines - the columns of readers' letters in quite a few provide evidence of an open-minded minority who wanted more equality with the men in their lives - but the rights that women enjoy today were a long way off.

It has been said that the pulps, with their bluntly provocative titles and lurid covers, were a "cradle of sensationalism". But that ignores the fact that they were the medium through which some excellent and sometimes experimental writing was published. They were also the place where some memorable art appeared, as the pages of this book will bear convincing witness. Although the magazines were mass-produced and largely stereotyped in their genres, they were read as eagerly then as television programmes are watched by people today. The constant need to fill pages, month after month, gave the more adventurous editors and art directors the excuse to publish whatever took their fancy, and they were safe in the knowledge that they could lay their hands on plenty of more traditional fare for any nit-picking readers who complained.

It is important to know a little of the history of those times in order to put the magazines into the context of the events that shaped the major genres that are the focus of this book. In January 1920, for instance, the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution came into force, banning the production and sale of alcohol. Prohibition had, of course, been operating in some States since the middle of the previous century, because alcohol was viewed there as a sin, and a lot of married women were convinced that bars would ruin family life. Only the mayor of New York foresaw the biggest problem - he reckoned he would need an extra 250,000 police officers to keep the city dry. Indeed, the harder the authorities tried, the harder the people, especially the young, rebelled. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled as much in his novels, such as This Side of Paradise (1920), in which he caught the spirit of fast-living youth and coined the term the Jazz Age.

In the world of fashion, too, skirts were getting higher and higher, in a trend toward minimum clothes and maximum cosmetics, as one writer described these 'shocking' sights. Corsets were also on the way out and sexy underwear was very much in - although in a handful of States the authorities became so alarmed about this that they seriously suggested that 'inappropriately dressed women' should be locked up. Along with drinking, which took place surreptitiously, of course, and at a quarter a shot was an expensive pursuit, smoking was frowned upon, as well as shaking about to the latest dance crazes, especially the Charleston. One group of churchmen was so incensed by the playing of jazz that they described it as 'a return to the jungle', and in 1927 the blonde bombshell Mae West pushed the boundaries of propriety even further with her play Sex, which mocked the conventions of virtue and decency. Evidence was given against her by some police officers who sneaked into a performance, and Mae was found guilty of indecent behaviour, fined $500, and sent to prison for ten days. The sexual revolution had arrived, even if it was not quite under way yet.

On the other hand, the impact of crime and gangsterism upon the fabric of US society was growing increasingly worse as the decade progressed - culminating in the infamous Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago on February 14, 1929, when seven mobsters were lined up against a beerhouse wall and mown down with sub-machine guns. The killers were all in the employ of Al Capone and were 'protecting' his monopoly in the city in the supplying of bootleg liquor, extortion, and prostitution. Worse still was to come on October 24, 1929, when Wall Street crashed and 13 million shares were traded on a panic-stricken New York stock exchange. This 'Black Thursday' marked the start of the Depression, which would affect the whole of the US during the next few years. It would take the steadying hand of the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to put the country back to work, end Prohibition (in 1933), and wage war against organised crime. For most folk there was little relief from this gloom apart from the escapism of radio, the movies (where the talkies had just arrived) and, as it transpired, the pulps - tickets to cheap thrills and gaudy pictures for the price of small change. Few publishing phenomena were better timed than that of the pulp magazines.

The pulp magazine was the idea of a former telegraph operator from Augusta, Maine, named Frank Andrew Munsey. He came to New York in 1882 determined to become a publisher. He had a simple maxim: The story is more important than the paper it is printed on, and he knew that, thanks to the advent of the new high-speed printing presses, it was possible to mass produce magazines in a way that had never been possible before. Munsey was well aware that the other popular publications of the time, such as Harper's, Scribner's, and The Century were printed on glossy or 'slick' paper made of rag-content stock. But he decided that if he used the much cheaper pulp paper, which was derived from a wood-fibre base and referred to as 'newsprint', he would be able to offer a much cheaper product. He would give readers a suggestion of value for money by giving the magazines a four-colour cover printed on art paper. The saving in costs, Munsey reckoned, would enable him to sell his 'pulps' at ten cents - less than half the price of a typical slick. It was a decision that would make his fortune and revolutionise publishing. The resulting pulp magazines measured, on average, ten inches by seven inches. The number of pages was normally 128 - containing something like 120,000 words of fiction - all stapled together through the cover, close to the spine. The paper, on which the text was printed in double columns, was thick and porous, and the edges were left uncut. The magazines gave off an unmistakable smell, which is still detectable in surviving copies today, and the pages usually turned yellow within months. But such factors failed to discourage the millions of potential readers who earned only meagre wages. The average earnings of a factory hand, for example, were about $7 for a ten to twelve hour day. Such people just wanted entertainment and escapist fare: simple, fast, and graphically illustrated. The pulps came into being as rivals to the slicks, which catered to the better-off sections of the US, and they quickly earned a reputation for being exploitative, unsophisticated, violent, and sexist. While this was true to a degree, they were also the proving grounds in which some great writers first made their mark - men such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, Zane Grey, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Abraham Merritt, Robert E. Howard, Robert E. Heinlein, John D. MacDonald, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and many others whose names will crop up in these pages. As more than one historian of the era has noted, there has not been a time, before or since, when so much entertaining fiction was available to so many so cheaply - albeit with a fair helping of trash thrown in too. The quality of the cover art and interior illustrations of the pulps has similarly been unfairly ridiculed without due study being made. In the early days, there were generally very few pictures inside the magazines, and those that there were had to be drawn in simple, bold strokes to avoid being over-inked or smudged into unrecognisable blurs when printed on the pulp paper. With the passage of time, however, a whole school of artists, some now deservedly famous and others long overdue for recognition, provided colourful, action-packed pictures of every conceivable situation, all intended to part customers from their hard-earned cash. At its best, the artwork had the same come-on effect as contemporary graphic art elsewhere, such as a poster advertising a new feature film or the next episode of a serial. These pictures may not always have been an accurate reflection of the contents, but their impact on sales was undeniable. Writing about this element of pulp magazine history in his Handbook of American Culture (1977), Bill Blackbeard has said: "Illustrating the pulps was nearly as important for sales in the 1930s as the lurid covers of nickel thrillers had been for their prosperity at the turn of the century [...] Supplying the considerable quantity of artwork was the task of a few dozen well-worked, professional ink, watercolour and oil artists, who varied in quality and reputation from the dreariest kind of scrawlers and daubers who worked for Desperation Row (as the skin-of-their-teeth pulp houses were called) to a number of fine artists of international fame who did occasional or regular pulp magazine illustrations for bread-and-butter money. Most, of course, were artists of reasonable competence and occasional flairs of real genius."

Among the roll call of these artists are names such as Paul Stahr, Hubert Rogers, John Newton Howitt, Walter M. Baumhofer, Max Plaisted, Harold S. Delay, Earle Bergey, Peter Driben, Enoch Bolles, Amos Sewell, Tom Greiner, Hans Waldemar Wessolowski, Howard V. Brown, Fred Craft, Rudolph Belarski, Rafael De Soto, Tom Lovell, Norman Saunders, J. E. Allen, Lyman Anderson, H. V. Parkhurst, Rudolph W. Zirm, Frank R. Paul, H. J. Ward, Monroe Eisenberg, Marvin Singer, Robert Gibson Jones, Virgil Finlay, Peter Poulton, Alexander Leydenfrost, Paul Orban, John Fleming Gould, Hannes Bok, Leo Morey, Alex Schomberg, Wynne W. Davis, Edd Cartier, Frank Kelly Freas, not forgetting a trio of outstanding women, Margaret Brundage, Irene Zimmerman, and Pauline Drappier. It is the artists' work especially that is being celebrated in this book. Without it the pulps might have amounted to only a chapter or two in publishing history rather than a gloriously colourful era packed with compelling - occasionally notorious - images that today provoke feelings of nostalgia among those old enough to remember, and a nod of admiration from younger generations seeing them for the first time. It has to be admitted that there were cheap publications for the masses long before Frank Munsey initiated the 'rag-paper to pulp-riches' era from his offices at 280 Broadway, New York. Almost a century earlier, a London entrepreneur, Edward Lloyd, had been at the forefront of a group of publishers in the city issuing Penny Dreadfuls, which enthralled the British public with serial stories of action, adventure, and plenty of lust (nothing new, you see). Varney the Vampyre, The Feast of Blood (1847), the daring exploits of The Smuggler King (1849), and the semi-pornographic liaisons of The Merry Wives of London (1850) all had lurid front-cover illustrations of gory encounters and terrified maidens. A little later, the firm of Beadle and Adams was the first to catch the US public's fancy with Dime Novels. These weekly publications recounted the exploits of men like the backwoods hero Deadwood Dick, the sporting champion Frank Merriwell, the ingenious boy inventor Frank Reade, and, perhaps most popular of all, the enduring young sleuth Nick Carter. Frank Munsey launched the pulp era in 1896 with a short story magazine of action and adventure tales, the Argosy. The magazine recruited its writers from everywhere - some, like Borden Chase, from the most unlikely backgrounds. Chase, whose real name was Frank Fowler, had worked in Chicago as a driver for Frankie Yale, a well-known bootlegger, until the day the mobster was shot by Al Capone. Fearing for his life, Fowler moved to New York, changed his name, and took to pulp writing with gusto. He remembered the experiences of those days well when he later moved again to Hollywood, where he soon became a script writer: "I was like a lot of other guys who got into writing for the pulps because they were there. They were looking for people with imagination - it didn't matter if you hadn't been to some of the places you wrote about as long as you could tell a good story. The crime stuff came easy to me so that's what I did. The editors at Munsey's always needed copy fast and you could get a cheque as soon as the story was accepted and they signed a voucher. They paid a dollar a thousand words. I once heard a story that Frank Munsey would evaluate the worth of a story by how heavy the manuscript felt in his hand, but that never happened to me!"

The success of Argosy inspired several more titles, including All Story Magazine, The Cavalier, and The Scrap Book, all masterminded by Munsey's brilliant editor, Robert H. Davis - the man who discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and Max Brand to name just two writers. Within a few years, the Munsey quarter had spawned an industry that would ultimately generate in excess of 300 titles. Their rivals were numerous, and all of them were anxious to get a piece of the pulp action: Street & Smith, Clayton Magazines, Popular Publications, Thrilling Publications, Culture Publications, the A. A. Wyn Group, and many more who will all feature in the following pages. Although the pulps were sold predominantly in the US, some were exported to Europe - often as ballast in merchant vessels - where they were sold off cheaply in chain stores like Woolworths. In time, Britain would produce its own range of pulps in what became known as the 'Mushroom Jungle'. The story of these 'Yankee Mags', as they were called, is dealt with in the final chapter. The variety of the pulps produced in the US during their heyday was truly incredible. Jostling alongside each other on the news-stands could be found Adventure, Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Detective Story Magazine, Ghost Stories, Golden Fleece, Horror Stories, Marvel Science Stories, New York Nights, Oriental Stories, Private Detective, Spicy Mystery Stories, Stolen Sweets, Terror Tales, War Stories, and Weird Tales to name just a few. Also fighting for space were the solo titles The Shadow, Doc Savage, Dusty Ayres and his Battle Birds, Secret Agent X, Doctor Death, Captain Satan, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and a number of others that survived beyond the pulp era as paperbacks or comics, and have been fully dealt with elsewhere. This list of titles merely hints at the dozens of similar magazines, catering for every possible taste, that poured from the presses in the US during the years between the two world wars. Some would prove very successful, but others would disappear after only a single issue. The hard-nosed pulp magnates and quick-buck publishers who worked side-by-side in this pulp jungle were united only in one simple factor - their attitude toward every title they issued. If the public didn't buy it in sufficient quantities, they ceased its publication immediately. In this context, the Dictionary of American Biography has some rather unflattering things to say about the 'founding father', Frank Munsey, which are no doubt just as true of many of his rivals: "He was not a reformer, nor an idealist, nor was he deeply interested in any causes. His passion was to found or purchase magazines and, later, newspapers. If one of his magazines failed to earn well he killed it and began another; if public taste passed from one of his productions he dropped it to develop another."

All the major pulp publishers were quick to seize on any new interest or trend, often following one another slavishly until the genre had become saturated with identical titles and sales dropped. It is perhaps pertinent to note that the rise of the superheroes like The Shadow, Doc Savage, Spider and the others coincided with the downfall of public figures during the Depression. The rise of crime in the US and the emergence of dictators in Europe were also regarded by the pulp publishers and their writers as forces that could be combated only by men of supernormal powers. The pulps were not just intended to entertain the reader - they were also meant to make him feel better about himself, his prospects, and especially his sex life. With this in mind, companies did not use the magazines to sell ordinary things like clothes or food, but instead tried to sell any number of do-it-yourself fitness courses, cures for bad breath, sex aids, 'home' movies, quack medicines, peek-a-boo nighties, and - because the magazines were full of unclothed girls - even courses in learning how to draw. Charles Atlas, who offered to help scrawny young men to keep their girls, rather than lose them to sand-kicking bullies, was one of the most prolific advertisers. And several less reputable companies pandered to every fad and fancy imaginable in the magazine's personal columns at the back. On offer were 'unretouched' photographs of French models, methods for curing weak bladders, ruptures, and piles, potions and lotions to restore energy and 'pep', instructions on how to hypnotise people (the illustration showing a beautiful girl, of course), pen-pals for lonely hearts, and a whole range of illustrated booklets and novelties - 'The Kind Men Like!' And because this was the Depression, there were courses in how to become an electrician, a salesman, even a detective, plus any number of ways to 'Earn Money At Home!'

The eventual death knell for the pulps began to sound during and after the end of the Second World War. Paper fell into short supply and became more costly - as did the metal required for the staples. These became so expensive that some publishers were forced to use just one through the spine. Tastes were also changing. A new sophistication was evident among readers, and suddenly the pulps were being regarded as 'something from the old days'. On the literary scene, a whole new generation of writers was starting to emerge who aspired to more permanent - and better paid - markets than the ephemeral, penny-a-line pulps. A few of the more popular pulp titles were downsized to digest format by their proprietors, as if to deny their heritage. At the same time, the frantic pace of the storytelling disappeared, along with the unashamed gaudiness of the art, which had been essential ingredients of the pulps. As sales of the rest fell and the frequency of publication stumbled from monthly to quarterly, the major distributors servicing the nation's news-stands drove the final nail in the coffin by cancelling their orders in favour of the exploding new market for comic books and original paperback fiction. Television, which was rapidly becoming a feature in every household, also cut savagely into the reading habits of the nation. Ironically, at this very time, Argosy and Blue Book, which had pioneered the pulp legend, were revamped, and reappeared on the news-stands as slick magazines! Some people felt that Frank Munsey would have turned in his grave, but others believed that the old pulp-meister would have already acted before the writing was on the wall. Whatever the case, the pulp magazine legend was secure. But the telling of it has required the passage of time and an end to the prejudice and snobbery directed against a very special era - when cheap thrills and big shots were the stuff of dreams for millions of ordinary people.

A golden era: I believe Crime Time readers will agree.