Pulp Culture - Bullets, Babes, Heroes And Bad Guys

- Robert Leslie Bellem

"Diamonds Of Death"

Hollywood Detective, 1950

More lurid than literary, with a strong slant towards sensationalism, they were the turf of hard-boiled private eyes, shady ladies, bizarre aliens from beyond the stars and unwavering heroic western lawmen - a medium of pure escapism for a simpler time that accomplished exactly what they set out to do: entertain.

An offshoot of the earlier dime novels, pulp magazines got their moniker from the low-grade, wood-pulp paper on which they were printed. Far removed from the slick, pictorially rich periodicals found on newsstands today, the name of the game was quantity over quality by putting as many of a publishers titles in front of readers as possible.

The first pulp to appear on the scene was Argosy, a reworked children's magazine that it's creator, Frank Munsey, Editorally transformed in order to appeal to a more adult audience.

Argosy became an instant hit, and with it's success spawned a stampede of imitators that covered every conceivable genre from mysteries to romance and everything in between under such titles as All-Story, Top-notch, The Popular Magazine and Adventure.

There were westerns and war stories, gangster dramas and courtroom thrillers. Many titles folded after only a few issues and others never made it past their first edition. Some met with a luckier fate, became quite successful and lasted for years.

Most pulps were produced on 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 untrimmed pages between vivid, melodramatically illustrated covers with a standard layout of a lead story of some 50,000 to 60,000 words with perhaps a half-dozen shorter stories.

Some were published weekly, others monthly, some came out bi-monthly or quarterly and at any one time as many as 300 different titles could be found at any magazine display.

With mass-production, the writing often suffered and plot formulas were sometimes recycled with new twists and characters. Pulps were not about art in any sense of the word - targeted towards the masses of the lower and middle class, they provided cheap entertainment at a time when expensive, hard-bound books were out of the reach of many.

Despite their dubious reputation, the pulps weren't without merit: they took the forefront in introducing the detective genre to a wider audience while the spirited tales of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories pushed science fiction into the mainstream.

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