Pulp Magazines

Introduction

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1950’s, a large portion of new mystery and detective fiction saw its first publication in the pages of popular pulp magazines. The pulps, as they were familiarly known, took their name from the cheap wood-pulp paper on which their text pages were printed. Generally measuring seven by ten inches, the brittle, short-fibered pages were fragile and difficult to preserve, but the magazines’ vividly colored covers were usually printed on stiffer and higher-quality, coated stock and were easily the most attractive and durable parts of the magazines. Most of the pulps published genre fiction—Westerns, men’s adventure stories, and science fiction, in addition to mystery and detective fiction—and their cover art generally depicted lurid subjects. Mystery and detective fiction antedates the pulp magazines, but during the twentieth century the pulps published more stories in that genre than any other format.

Pulp Origins, 1890’s to 1918

Theories on the origins of the pulps differ. According to some scholars, the magazines originated in the United States when Frank A. Munsey, a publisher of stories about idealistic juveniles, transformed Argosy from a magazine designed for adolescent boys to one specializing in adventure stories for adults. Other scholars claim that the pulps owed their origin to nineteenth century dime novels, which were printed on wood-pulp paper and antedated Argosy. Most dime novels were Western stories, but stories about detective heroes were also popular. For example, a character named Old Cap Collier appeared in a series of detective stories that numbered more than seven hundred titles by 1900. His spirited individuality, skill in fisticuffs, and penchant for disguises made him especially popular among young male readers.

By the turn of the twentieth century, dime novelists had created such new urban detectives as Old Sleuth, Nick Carter, and Frank Merriwell. Popular during the 1880’s and 1890’s, stories in the Old Sleuth series were often set in such New York City locales as Broadway and the Bowery, where a young detective, disguised as an old man, solved a variety of crimes. The Nick Carter stories also reached their peak of popularity around the same time. Thousands of these stories, written by Eugene T. Sawyer, Frederick van Rensselaer Dey, and many other authors, appeared in such publications as the Nick Carter Library, which began in 1891, and Nick Carter Weekly, which began in 1896. Some scholars claim that the Nick Carter stories, with their urban concerns, anticipated the later emergence of hard-boiled detective fiction, but Nick Carter, who never smoked, drank, or swore, scarcely prefigures Sam Spade, nor does Frank Merriwell, a college hero who solved crimes. Nevertheless, some scholars have seen Merriwell as a bridge between nineteenth and twentieth century detectives.

During the first decade of Argosy’s existence, Munsey increased the magazine’s circulation to one-half million by satisfying the public’s demand for a variety of short stories, including the mystery and detective genres. The American mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart published some of her early stories in Argosy, although she became much better known through her novels, which she began publishing in 1908. Argosy’s success stimulated competition, particularly from pulp magazines that specialized in one type of story, such as Street & Smith’sDetective Story Magazine, which began in 1915. The proliferation of pulp magazines helped support a growing number of writers, some of whom cranked out a new story almost every day. Writers had to produce a great volume of material because some publishers paid them as little as one cent per line. However, the usual rate was one or two cents a word. Such rapid writing often meant that quality suffered, but the public seemed not to mind. By the end of World War I more than twenty pulp magazines, which sold at prices from ten to twenty-five cents a copy, were flourishing, and the pulp market was far from saturated.

Proliferation of the Pulps, 1918-1929

During the two decades following the end of World War I, the number of pulp magazines grew exponentially as various publishers launched hundreds of specialized titles to satisfy the public’s accelerating appetite for Westerns and romances as well as adventure, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery and detective stories. As many as seventeen hundred new writers may have contributed mystery and detective stories to pulp magazines during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Some of the magazines were monthlies containing more than two hundred pages. More common, however, were 128-page weeklies. Two publishers, Frank A. Munsey and Street & Smith, dominated the pulp field during the 1920’s, but their success inspired many competitors, from established publishing houses to hole-in-the-wall operations. Detective pulps contained both factual and fictional stories. For example, Bernard Macfadden, a health crusader, published True Detective Mysteries, which some saw as related to his “true-confessions” pulps, as both genres exploited sin.

The most famous and influential of the fictional detective pulps was Black Mask, the creation of the magazine editor and poet Henry L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. Mencken was aware of the success of Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine magazine, and his own high-quality lifestyle magazine, Smart Set, was in financial difficulty. In 1919, Mencken got the idea of publishing a pulp magazine modeled on Argosy that would serve as what he called “boob bait” and generate the profits that would return Smart Set to fiscal health.

When the first issue of Black Mask appeared in April, 1920, editors Mencken and Nathan promised to publish the best stories in a variety of genres, including adventure, romance, and the occult, along with mystery and detective fiction. Despite the broad variety and generally low quality of most of the magazine’s stories, Black Mask was a success. In November, 1920, after publishing only eight issues of the magazine, Mencken and Nathan sold it to Eltinge (“Pop”) Warner and Eugene Crowe, a paper manufacturer. Some scholars put the sales figure at $12,500, others at $7,500. In either case, the selling price represented a substantial profit because Black Mask’s launching cost had been only $500.

Over the next five years, with the capable guidance of such editors as Phil Cody and Harry North, Black Mask began to publish more crime and detective stories with individualistic heroes whose use of violence grew out of personal codes of ethics. Early issues of Black Mask contained stories in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, that is, tales of ratiocination. However, the United States of the 1920’s was vastly different from the worlds of Poe and Doyle. Passage of the Volstead Act in 1919 prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, a situation that led to the multiplication of gangsters willing to break the law to sate the thirsts of millions of Americans. With the rise of violence and lawlessness in American society during the 1920’s, millions of World War I veterans, cynical citizens, flappers, and others were attracted to magazines offering reasonably realistic explorations of crime and social changes.

One of the writers who helped create this new kind of detective fiction was Carroll John Daly, whose earlier career was in managing theaters in New Jersey. He began publishing stories in Black Mask in 1922, and some scholars consider his “The False Burton Combs” the first true hard-boiled story, even though its nameless hero is not a detective. Nevertheless, Daly’s unsentimental gentleman adventurer proved willing to serve as a bridge between the world of law-enforcers and law-breakers. “Three Gun Terry,” which Daly published in the May 15, 1923, issue of Black Mask, developed his tough-talking protagonist by making him a detective and even giving him a name, Terry Mack. Daly’s hero saw himself at the center of a triangle whose corners were the police, the criminals, and the victims. Novelist and critic William F. Nolan claimed that this story contained “almost every cliché” that would afflict the genre from the 1920’s into the 1980’s.

The most popular and influential character that Daly created, however, was Race Williams, who first appeared in Black Mask in 1923. He would later play his heroic role in seventy pulp-magazine stories and eight novels. Williams has also been called the first hard-boiled detective, and his characteristic traits certainly made him a better exemplar of the genre than any of Daly’s earlier characters. In a fictional world in which everyone was more or less evil, Williams often had to choose the lesser of two evils to bring about justice. Relying on a personal code of ethics reminiscent of those gunmen who delivered frontier justice in the American West, Williams boasted that he never killed a person who did not deserve to die. Critics have found Daly’s style stiff and awkward and his plots melodramatic, and his pioneering efforts pale in significance when compared to his Black Mask successors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Shortly after Race Williams appeared, another hard-boiled hero began his career in the pages of Black Mask. This character was called the Continental Op by his creator, Dashiell Hammett, whom some scholars have called the true creator of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. Hammett had actually worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency before he took up writing. He was in his late twenties and living in San Francisco when he decided to leave the agency and begin writing stories for magazines. His first story, which he published in Black Mask under the pseudonym of Peter Collinson in December, 1922, was clearly the work of an apprentice.

Not until October 1, 1923, when Black Mask published “Arson Plus,” Hammett’s first Continental Op story, did Hammett find his subject and his voice. His first-person narrator was a middle-aged, urban private investigator. Although his first case, which involved arson and insurance fraud, culminated in a car chase and shoot-out, the story obviously benefited from Hammett’s experiences as a Pinkerton investigator, since the investigations leading to the climax were methodical and professional.

Scholars disagree whether the Continental Op and Hammett’s other heroes are realistic or romantic. Those who favor realism point to the influence of Ernest Hemingway on Hammett’s style and contents; they also call attention to Hammett’s disdain for English mystery stories set in country estates populated by family members, upper-class guests, and servants. Those who argue for Hammett’s romanticism point to his heroes as paragons of independence, isolated from both police and people, able to rise above the temptations of money and sex. For these interpreters, Hammett’s heroes have more in common with medieval knights than modern private investigators.

Because Hammett experimented with characters, plots, and techniques, it is difficult, if not impossible, to categorize him as a realist or romantic. This would be attempting to stereotype a writer who strove to avoid the stereotypical. The Continental Op shares traits of other hard-boiled investigators. Like Daly’s Race Williams, for example, the Op is a professional knowledgeable about both sides of the law. Unlike Williams, the Op is detached and cool-tempered, particularly in Hammett’s early stories. In later stories, the Op frequently becomes the recipient of violence when criminals beat and torture him, and he seems to enjoy the retribution when he exacts revenge on his persecutors.

At the end of 1926 Joseph T. Shaw, a former army captain and reporter, became the new editor of Black Mask. During the following decade he transformed the magazine into a successful haven for the new type of detective. After narrowing the magazine’s focus to crime, detective, and mystery stories, to the exclusion of all other genres, he increased its circulation from 66,000 to well over 100,000. He encouraged new and talented writers, and, through his judicious editing, fostered a style that emphasized simplicity, clarity, and plausibility. He strongly believed that action not rooted in three-dimensional characters was boring and meaningless. Important writers whose work he fostered included Raymond Chandler, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain, Lester Dent, and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Shaw also encouraged writers to submit novelettes and novels, which allowed for much more complex characterizations and plots than short stories did. For example, Dashiell Hammett’s novel “The Cleansing of Poisonville”,; which began serial publication in Black Mask’s November, 1927, issue, contains twenty-six murders, and the Op rescues a Montana mining town that has been taken over by criminals. When the hardcover version of the novel was issued in February, 1929, its title was changed to Red Harvest. Over the next three years, Black Mask published three more Hammett series that became classic novels in book form.

The third decade of the twentieth century has been called the Golden Age of American detective stories because of the large number and high quality of stories published by various pulp magazines, especially Black Mask. Other examples of popular fictional detectives from this period include the Chinese American detective Charlie Chan, created by Earl Derr Biggers, who first appeared in The House Without a Key in 1925. Chan mixed scientific techniques and Far Eastern wisdom in solving various crimes.

Although hard-boiled detectives predominated during the 1920’s, detective stories in the English tradition still had their adherents. For example, S. S. Van Dine introduced Philo Vance to the American public in The Benson Murder Case in 1926. This and the later entries in the series made Van Dine very wealthy, and Philo Vance reigned for years as the most famous sleuth in the world. The novels of Hammett and Van Dine were often made into Hollywood films, and some, such as John Huston’s adaptation of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), became classics.

The Great Depression, which began in 1929, would have a profound effect on pulp fiction. New publishers appeared while other houses were consolidated. When American News Company, a magazine distributor, lost its largest client, Street & Smith, a new line of pulp magazines was needed, and Standard Publications began to be edited by Leo Margulies, who formerly worked for Munsey. Margulies launched such new detective pulps as The Phantom Detective and Thrilling Detective. Henry Steeger and Harold Goldsmith founded Popular Publications in 1930. Among their products were such detective pulp magazines as Detective Action Stories. Within a decade Popular Publications would become the world’s largest issuer of pulp magazines. One of their most successful magazines was Dime Detective, which often sold more than 300,000 copies of single issues. Some critics rate this pulp as second only to Black Mask in the quality of its stories.

Summit of Detective Pulps During the 1930’s

Surprising though it may seem, pulp detective fiction flourished during the darkest days of the Depression. Black Mask continued to sell well during the early years of the 1930’s. Many Americans had to live on radically reduced incomes, and the hard-boiled stories of the pulps emphasized the gloomy side of life and human nature. Nevertheless, in most pulp stories, no matter how grim the problems were, they were eventually solved by the clever actions of astute individuals. The stories thus helped readers escape from a world in which the problems of the Depression were not so easily solved.

Meanwhile, Hammett published his last story in Black Mask in November, 1930, but other writers emerged to replace him. The most popular writer after Hammett was Erle Stanley Gardner, who, under the pseudonym Charles M. Green, began writing pulp stories during the 1920’s. However, his popularity was principally due to his Perry Mason novels, the first of which, The Case of the Velvet Claws, was published in 1933. Rex Stout is an unusual example of an important mystery writer of that era who bypassed an apprenticeship in the pulps. His successful series of novels centering on the fat, orchid-raising Nero Wolfe began with publication of Fer-de-Lance in 1934.

The greatest of Hammett’s successors was Raymond Chandler. Although born in Chicago, he was raised and educated in England, and after serving in the Canadian army during World War I, he moved to California, where he had a series of jobs and married. After being fired from his position with an oil company, Chandler took up writing. In 1933, at a penny per word, he sold his first story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” to Black Mask for $180. Shaw continued to publish Chandler’s carefully crafted stories throughout the decade. Because Chandler was a slow and meticulous writer, he sold only four or five stories per year. He introduced his most famous detective, Philip Marlowe, in 1939, but Marlowe had predecessors in the twenty stories that Chandler published earlier. The hard-boiled heroes in those stories are often private detectives, but others include an undercover operative in a narcotics squad and even a hotel detective. Chandler was sympathetic to Hammett and other hard-boiled writers. He praised this new type of detective fiction for rescuing the genre from genteel English writers who often depicted murders occurring in vicarages with such weapons as “duelling pistols, curare or tropical fish.” Americans had given murder back to the gangsters and racketeers who commit it for good reasons and who really know how to do it.

While writing short stories for the pulps, Chandler began writing a novel, which was published as The Big Sleep in 1939. Its success led to his concentrating on novel writing, and his last pulp magazine story was published in 1941. By that time he had published his second novel, Farewell, My Lovely (1940). He would continue to publish novels into the 1960’s, but his early pulp stories already contained the essence of his later achievements. His heroes, Marlowe and his antecedents, have often been described as “modern knights,” and scholars have debated whether Chandler’s stories are romantic or realistic. Chandler’s Southern California settings are often grimly realistic, and he graphically presents what happens when human passions are distorted by such obsessions as greed or lust. On the other hand, his hero always manages to occupy the moral high ground, where he is also insightful in mocking his own pretensions. Like a medieval knight, Marlowe laments how idealism has become corrupted in a seductively deceitful world.

Black Mask’s success bred imitators, such as Detective Fiction Weekly and Black Aces, and the increased competition reduced its circulation from a high of over 100,000 to 63,000 in 1935. When the editor Shaw was asked to take a pay cut in 1936, he refused, choosing to leave Black Mask instead. Raymond Chandler then switched his allegiance to Dime Detective. Many scholars have praised Shaw’s editorship at Black Mask for helping to establish the hard-boiled detective story as an influential literary achievement. The poet and critic W. H. Auden lauded Chandler’s stories and novels as great works of art.

Because some detective pulps had very short lives, estimates of their total numbers differ. Some scholars have calculated that more than 170 different detective pulp magazines made it to the newsstands during the 1920’s and 1930’s. A few lasted through the 1940’s into the 1950’s, but most had much shorter lives. What had been innovative in Black Mask became formulaic in its imitators.

Just as there was an interaction between certain pulp stories and the films, so, too, a fruitful interaction took place between radio and the pulps. For example, Street & Smith had a radio program to promote its Detective Story Magazine magazine. At the suggestion of a radio writer, the program’s narrator began using the tag line, “The Shadow knows,” followed by a scarifying laugh. The success of this ploy with listeners led to the success of The Shadow magazine, based on the radio character of the same name. This, in turn, led to a resurgence of single-character pulp magazines. For example, Leo Margulies created The Phantom, which enjoyed a long life during the 1930’s. However, the heyday of hero pulps ended as the 1940’s began.

While the hard-boiled private investigators dominated the pulp market, other detective pulps were based on crime fighters with different occupations. For example, Richard Sale, a former newspaperman, created a popular newspaper-based series that featured Joe “Daffy” Dill and his photographer friend and ally, Candid Jones. Some pulp sleuths had unusual professions. They could be magicians, inventors, acrobats, even morticians. Raoul Whitfield, a former silent-film actor and World War I fighter pilot, had lived for a time in the Philippines, and he wrote twenty-four stories that featured Jo Gar, a Filipino private detective who worked in Manila. Another Whitfield series centered on Ben Jardinn, a Hollywood private detective.

Other pulp writers tried to subvert the hard-boiled prototype by writing stories centered on so-called defective detectives. Dime Mystery published stories devoted to the exploits of private investigators suffering from various defects or diseases. For example, Calvin Kane was a detective with deformed legs, and Nicholas Street was a detective who suffered from amnesia. Whatever their organic deficiencies, from blindness to hemophilia, these detectives could still solve crimes. Lawrence Treat, who was educated at Dartmouth College and at the Columbia University School of Law, garnered experience as a San Diego policeman to help create some of the earliest police procedural stories, a genre later brought to perfection in the novels and stories of Ed McBain.

Some 1930’s writers tried to take the hard-boiled style in new directions. A good example of such a writer is Cornell Woolrich, who has been called a “pulp genius.” Born in New York City in 1903 and educated at Columbia University, he was haunted, from early in his life, by a sense of doom, and this feeling, starting during the 1930’s, provided him with the tragic themes that he developed in stories for such pulp magazines as Black Mask and Detective Fiction Weekly. He sold his first crime story, “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair,” to the latter magazine for $110 in 1934. His stories were often set in squalid surroundings, such as cramped tenements in lower Manhattan, in subways, and in dime-a-dance halls. His stories of dark passions and nameless terrors often have surprise twists, and many scholars see Woolrich as the founder of noir fiction. Some of his later novels and stories were indeed made into film noir classics, and other stories provided the plots for such classic films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and François Truffaut’s La Mariée était en noir (1968; The Bride Wore Black). Unlike the cool toughness of the hard-boiled detectives, Woolrich’s protagonists were often troubled by unbearable anxieties.

Problems During the 1940’s

Although Americans continued to buy pulp magazines in large numbers during the World War II years, an astute critic would have seen the signs that the days of pulp magazines were numbered. Two factors that would play a role in the demise of the pulps during the 1950’s had already surfaced in the 1940’s. The first was the rise of comic books, which, by the early 1940’s, already had combined monthly sales in the tens of millions. Two comic book titles, alone, Action Comics and Superman, sold more than two million copies per month. By the end of the war, the circulation of comic books was four times that of the pulps.

The other factor was the development of the paperback, or “pocket-sized,” books. During the 1940’s, book publishers began issuing massive editions of popular soft-cover titles, and detective and mystery novels proved to be particular favorites of the general reading public. The U.S. entry into World War II stimulated the production of paperback books, which families were encouraged by various organizations to send to friends and relatives in uniform. The Red Cross, for example, mounted drives for paperback books for soldiers and sailors. Finally, most Americans tended to view paperback books more favorably than the “sordid” pulp magazines. No organization ever sponsored the sending of pulp magazines to Americans in uniform.

Despite these difficulties, many pulp magazines continued to sell well during the war years, and some new magazines were also founded. For example, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine was established in 1941. Ellery Queen was the pseudonym for a pair of cousins, authors Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee and was also the name of a central character in their stories, along with Inspector Richard Queen. The long and very popular series of Ellery Queen novels began with The Roman Hat Mystery in 1929. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine was not only very popular in the 1940’s and 1950’s, but it was also one of the very few pulp magazines that survived into the twenty-first century.

A third factor that contributed to the problems of the pulps was the shortage of wood-pulp paper during the war. Wartime paper restrictions necessitated caps on overall circulations, and the pulp publishers responded in the only way they could—by dropping their pulp magazines with the smallest circulations in order to protect their major moneymakers. Fewer magazines meant fewer stories, and that in turn meant that fewer writers could make their living selling stories to the pulps. Several important pulp writers of detective and crime stories had already left the genre to become novelists, for example, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. Others began selling detective stories to such “slick” magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, which often paid ten to twenty-five cents per word. Other detective, crime, and mystery writers who had published in the pulps found work as screenwriters in Hollywood.

A significant event for all mystery writers occurred in 1945, with the foundation of the Mystery Writers of America. This professional organization was dedicated to raising the quality and quantity of mystery and detective fiction, and to improving the economic condition of its members. During its early years the society had about four hundred writers as members. Meanwhile, during the immediate postwar years, the pulps steadily declined in sales and in quality. Many pulp magazines disappeared.

By the end of the 1940’s, the great variety of pulp genres had been reduced to three categories: Westerns, science fiction, and detective stories. Within these genres new titles sometimes appeared, but even after American paper production returned to prewar levels, much of the paper went into paperback books instead of pulp magazines. Detective titles were extremely popular in paperback formats. Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury (1947) was the first mystery or detective novel to sell more than six million copies. Spillane’s chief character, Mike Hammer, had clearly evolved from previous hard-boiled detectives, but the Hammer series of novels contained much more sex, sadism, and sensationalism than their earlier models.

During the late 1940’s, two other problems confronted publishers of pulp magazines. Some major periodical distributors decided that they no longer wanted to handle inexpensive fiction magazines. This change forced Street & Smith to stop production of all its pulp magazines, with the exception of the particularly successful Astounding Science Fiction. The rise of book clubs may also have contributed to smaller audiences for pulp-fiction magazines. With a few exceptions, detective and mystery pulps saw their numbers drastically reduced, and many detective-story writers found themselves without markets.

Decline of the Pulps During the 1950’s

During the 1950’s, pulp magazines were no longer a major source of entertaining stories for the American public. By then, detective, crime, and mystery stories were increasingly being told in other forms, from comic books and inexpensive paperbacks to slick magazines, films, and television. In the culture that arose from the Cold War, spy stories became an ever more important genre. Many authors who would have published in the pulp magazines, had they written during the 1930’s, were publishing in other places. Such writers included Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, Chester Himes, and Patricia Highsmith. Like their pulp predecessors, these authors were criticized for writing stories that corrupted traditional human values, but their defenders pointed out that the stories of these authors went to the core of the cultural contradictions inherent in Cold War societies. Their works challenged the patriotic pieties of the Cold War by emphasizing the devastating ironies of societies bent on mutually assured destruction.

Some scholars have suggested 1957 as the year in which pulp magazines effectively died. That was the year in which bankruptcy struck down the American News Company, which had been the primary distributor of pulp magazines. However, while many pulps stopped publishing at that time, others soldiered on.

Something else that happened during the mid-1950’s may also have contributed to the demise of certain mystery and terror pulps. In 1954, psychologist Frederick Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a book that detailed the negative influences on the psychosocial development of children who were exposed to the sex, violence, and cruelty in crime, horror, and terror comic books. Wertham’s book prompted a Senate subcommittee investigation, and the comic book industry responded by instituting a standards code that had a chilling effect, not only on crime and horror comics but also on pulp magazines with similar kinds of stories. Liberals tended to see this code as restricting freedom of artistic expression, but Wertham’s defenders argued that many banned stories taught children that violence is a way to solve problems—a notion that could pave the way to vigilantism.

In 1951, Black Mask published its final issue, but two years later it was incorporated into Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which occasionally reprinted classic stories by former Black Mask authors. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine was one of the survivors from the pulp era. Other mystery magazines that resembled it in having famous names attached to them also survived. Examples included Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Sporadic efforts were later made to revive classic pulp magazines for specialized audiences. While most such efforts failed, many of the most popular and most influential stories from the pulp era have been reprinted in book form. After 2000, some small independent publishers issued magazines that contained stories in the pulp tradition, but these had very limited runs, and the magazines were not printed on pulp paper, and so they could not be considered genuine pulp magazines.

Legacy of the Pulps

As with so much else in American cultural history, the detective, crime, and mystery pulps were born, flourished, and died in response to the demands of the marketplace. Through several decades in the twentieth century pulp magazines constituted a major means of entertainment for millions of Americans, ranging from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the callow Kansas adolescent. Several explanations can be advanced to account for the magazines’ success. Pulp fiction writers produced stories with heroes to whom ordinary people could relate. Crime and detective stories also had an appealing dialectic of innocence and guilt through which writers tried to make sense of seemingly random events. In this way some of the best stories provided important lessons for life. In his study of crime and mystery stories, the English poet W. H. Auden argued that these genres had artistic merit, since they taught readers that victims were not all completely innocent and that villains were not all totally guilty. Auden felt that a complex admixture of good and evil must be seen as central to human existence.

A further contribution of pulp magazines was the experience they provided to such fledgling writers as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. These writers now have positions of great respect in the history of American literature, and their stories and novels are taught at universities around the world.

Pulp crime, mystery, and detective stories have also provoked criticisms. Some scholars have pointed out that the authors of these stories often wrote quickly, sloppily, and superficially. Their plots and characters were formulaic, and their primary purpose was instant gratification. This is the way these magazines tended to be perceived and used by many members of the general public, and this is also the reason so few of these magazines have physically survived, as most copies were discarded as soon as they were read. Other critics have emphasized that representations of human relationships and values in pulp stories tend to be false. For example, unlike in the pulps, extreme violence plays a very small role in ordinary human relationships. The distinguished English novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence suggested that some pulp stories reveal something ugly about the American soul, which is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

Cultural historians have studied pulp magazines to learn what they can reveal about what moved ordinary Americans in changing times. Pulp magazines reflected their times, and detective, crime, and mystery stories helped to reveal the multifaceted nature of Depression-era America. What writers and readers of the time considered heroic or demonic can be instructive in understanding the deepest values held by Americans during those troubled years. Pulp magazine stories can therefore serve as a window on the joys and anxieties, hopes and frustrations, fears and triumphs of a people who eventually grew into what some have called the “greatest generation”—the men and women who fought and won World War II.

Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once devised a dictum stating that 90 percent of everything is “crap.” That dictum applies as much to the pulps as it does to other genres. Most of the stories published in the pulps are now forgotten, but a small percentage of them did more than provide ephemeral entertainment for adolescents, workers, and the poor. Some reached the level of literary greatness because they communicated characters, ideas, and values the contemplation of which continues to deepen the sensibilities of new audiences. Some of the best of these stories also challenged the ideas and values that were held then and are still held today. This, too, is the role of good literature, to provoke as well as to enlighten.

Because of the tremendous variety in the quality of pulp magazine fiction, no simple conclusions can be given for the field of pulp detective fiction as a whole. In their day, pulp detective, crime, and mystery stories offered many readers satisfying solutions to problems raised by the stories themselves. In this sense, many stories were capsule morality plays that provided solace to those who were overwhelmed by the problems of the Depression. Although twenty-first century America is very different from Depression-era America, many problems, both personal and public, continue to confront Americans, who still find entertainment, enlightenment, satisfaction, and challenges in a genre that was initiated by Poe, developed by Doyle, extended by Hammett and Chandler, and now the preferred form for many storytellers around the world.

Bibliography

Delamater, Jerome H., and Ruth Prigozy, eds. The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. The first section of this collection of articles, “Raymond Chandler and American Detective Fiction,” has some analysis of Chandler’s work for pulp fiction magazines. The second section, “The Detective in Film and Television,” contains an article on Perry Mason, the Erle Stanley Gardner character who first made his appearance in the pulps. References at the ends of some articles. Index.

Goldstone, Tony. The Pulps: Fifty Years of American Pop Culture. New York: Bonanza Books, 1970. This anthology contains representative examples of pulp stories from many genres, including detective stories. Goldstone’s general introduction surveys a century of pulp fiction, and each genre also has an introductory section. Illustrated but no index.

Goulart, Ron. An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines. New York: Ace Books, 1972. This paperback reprint of a work originally entitled Cheap Thrills analyzes popular fiction from the time of the dime novels to the paperbacks of the late twentieth century. The author discusses detective, crime, and mystery stories published in the pulps during the period between the World Wars. Illustrated but no index.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2001. This American edition of a work originally published in England contains historical, biographical, and literary analyses of pulp stories published in a number of genres, including detective and mystery fiction.

Nevins, Francis M., comp. The Mystery Writer’s Art. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970. Anthology of critical articles divided into three parts: Appreciations, Taxonomy, and Speculation and Critique. Philip Dunham’s article, “The Black Mask School,” is helpful, and other pulp magazines and writers are analyzed in other articles. Each article ends with a “More on Author and Subject” section. No index.

Nolan, William F., ed. The Black Mask Boys. New York: William Morrow, 1985. Black Mask was the “bible” for many pulp fiction detective writers, and this book’s goal is to introduce readers to some of the best. The book also contains a helpful list of 168 names of crime and detective pulp magazines. Those who want to study Black Mask writers in greater depth should consult the extensive bibliography in William F. Nolan’s Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook (Santa Barbara, Calif.: McNally and Loftin, 1969).

Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964. This survey of American popular magazines from the end of the nineteenth century to 1964 contains some analyses of specific pulp magazines but is more helpful in situating the pulps in the larger context of modern general-audience periodicals. Extensive index.

Server, Lee. Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993. This popular history of the pulps contains, after a useful introduction, chapters on various genres, including the detective and mystery pulps. Well illustrated with a bibliography.

Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741-1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Authors explore detective pulp fiction in a chapter on “Developing the Mass Market.” Bibliography and index.