Pulp Today (Core Pulp Genres)

The Core Pulp Genres

In our last installment on this subject we covered the various Pulp Fiction genres derived from tragedy. Since the time of the ancients all fiction has been divided between two horizons, tragedy and comedy. Tragedies are constructed as a form of moral instruction. Comedies, by contrast, are exercises in wit. Further subdivisions within the general comedy spectrum started to appear by the end of the Renaissance. By the time the Romantic period rolled around, what was comedy had bifurcated further. spawning romance. and from that, adventure and fantasy. The Pulp Genres themselves represent further subdivisions.

There are dozens of established genres of fiction. Once there was a critical mass of literate people and the industrial capacity to reach them, producers began probing audience preferences. That is the rather trite progression of things. In industrialized times the true divisions are between what is judged as “Literary” and what is judged “Popular” fiction. Both types of fiction are genre bound—and share genres to some extent. Much of what is considered popular fiction got its start as pulp fiction. Our focus is on those popular genres which first came to light with the rise of fiction magazines through the advent of the paperback original.

After our first posting on this subject, it occurred to me that I had not given a listing of what the pulp genres are. That is our purpose in this posting. Although pulp fiction continues to evolve, our focus here will be on genres which originated in the past. Our descriptions will make mention of various eras, some of which overlap. The Romantic Era, where this form of literature first emerged, is generally considered to have been from 1780 to 1850. Our other eras are mostly bound to specific mediums. The Dime Novel era is from 1840 to 1930 or so, encompassing the era of Illustrated Newspapers and Story Papers. Our primary focus is on the Pulp Era which is from 1880 through 1960ish. Following is a short overview of the genres which were originated or enjoyed most of their popularity in the form of Dime Novels, Pulp Magazines, Original Paperback Novels and Comic Books.

As you will see, not all of the genres translated to other mediums. The once popular Horatio Alger Story gasped its last breaths in the Dime Novels of the 1880s. (1) By that time this Pluck and Luck genre of boy’s fiction had flunked out of literary fiction and had a half life in the story papers as remaindered syndicated fiction. Some genres, such as the Zeppelin-themed adventure tale came and went within a few years. Other genres, like the Western Romance, hung around in pulp magazine form forever, but never strayed. Most genres translated well into other mediums and have clear roots and multiple descendents. And some of the genres are just plain odd, which is half the fun.

The aim of this posting is to describe the significant pulp genres. They fall under several broad headings, meaning that the genres are similar to each other. Similar genres listed under the same broad heading may not be descended from the same root. True Confessions, for example, is a type of romance, but it is not descended from the  Gothic form. In this overview we will describe the genres briefly and give a short history of each.  The genres relationships to each other and current directions will be the subjects of future postings. Our purpose here is merely to define what  Pulp Fiction actually includes.  The following Core Genres exclude those descended from Tragedy, which were covered in our previous listing.   

Serial Character Continuity: Today we expect the televised fiction shows that we watch regularly to feature the same characters from episode to episode.  Dropping in on the progress of subplots involving the various characters is half the attraction. It’s such a given that it might be difficult for the modern consumer of such to imagine a time when this was anything but the case. The expectation of Serial Character Continuity ported itself over from Radio to Television, having previously commuted from Pulp Magazine fiction, to installment Movie Serials to Radio. (2) The idea actually first surfaced in Dime Novels. Prior to that it was somewhat rare for a fictional character to appear in more than one work.  Once there was some money in writing fiction, many authors starting reusing characters that were proven sellers. Even Mark Twain did this. The Pulp Fiction variant of this advent has two distinctions. First, the characters were generally owned by the publisher. They were corporate creations, group thinked into being at editorial meetings. The authors were merely hired hands, shoveling out scripts made to order. (3) Second, the characters appeared regularly, as headliners in every issue of the publication.  These Serial Continuity Characters appeared in the Detective Mystery, Western and Science Fiction genres with some regularity. It was a hit or miss proposition, with most characters fading fast and a select few hanging on well past the prime popularity of their genre. Most Serial Continuity Characters lived within the bounds of a single specific genre, but there were variants and specialties, such as…

Aviation Hero: Character magazines featuring the continuing exploits of WWI aces was an outgrowth of two pulp trends—the popularity of everything aviation, and a wave of nostalgia for the Great War which picked up in the latter 1920s. While interest in all things WWI continued in pulp pages throughout the 1930s, the actual aviation character magazines began to migrate from their settings almost from the onset. (Oddly there never was a continuing character magazine about a WWI infantryman.) As opposed to some alliteration of the Red Baron, many of these aces wound up fighting against science fiction foes and creatures plucked from myth. In a way, they were the first superheroes. A similar evolution took place amongst the later WWII aviation comic book heroes. Once that war started to fade, fighter aircraft flyers such as Airboy, Skyman and Captain Midnight headed off into space or found themselves set against by assortments of mad scientists and wizards—reliving the fates of their pulp predecessors from a generation before. The entire genre dropped dead after the emergence of affordable commercial air travel. Simply being an aviator or even a spaceman has not been enough to justify even one character title since. During its time, the Aviation Hero was a fairly popular genre, translating from Pulps, to Comic Books, to Comic Strips, to Radio and Movie Serials.

Glam Detective: It’s the hardboiled detective meets travelogue. Our hero has decided to set up his sleuthing shop in a particularly picturesque locale. The hardboiled genre went Hollywood fairly early on so it should come as no surprise that La La Land was the first  venue visited by this genre. Your typical Hollywood Detective only deals with people in the business—actors, agents, studio bosses. Only the glamorous need apply. From Hollywood it migrated to Las Vegas and Hawaii. All said, it’s a way to dress up some rather pedestrian detective procedural with nifty setting details and an overdose of pretty people. There may have been all of two pulp fiction magazines based on this idea, which actually got its start in the supposedly non-fiction True Detective magazines. Sticking the word Hollywood on anything sells magazines. Grafting it onto True Detective makes about as much sense as grafting Hollywood onto the Romance genre word Love. Since those ideas worked well in spades, why not a character pulp? Normally such extrapolated grafting fails, but this experiment walked off the slab, storming over all media. Glam Detectives were soon all over radio and then television. In fact, the Glam Detective is such a staple on television that there has been at least one program in its genre on in every era up to the present. Given that the iconoclastic and cynical Hardboiled genre was already entering its third decade by the time TV flickered into being, it was in need of a little sprucing up. The genre fit very well into mediums which were themselves also products of Hollywood.

Horror Host: The narrator of an anthology of horror stories, a character who makes quips before, during and after the action of a story or who serves as a framing element for several stories in one package. Prior to the advent of Rod Sterling and Alfred Hitchcock, it was primarily considered a comic book form. The sardonic presentation owes quite a bit to the splash page editorial teases from the old horror pulps. The best remembered of this lot include the trio of Keepers from the old EC Comics line and Mister Crime from the Lev Gleason comic book sensation Crime Does Not Pay. (4) The root of all of these presentations can be found in the character known as The Shadow. For a time, The Shadow was the narrator for various broadcasts culled from the pages of Street & Smith magazines. (He narrated both the Detective Fiction show as well as its Romance summer replacement.) This character was then used in the same role on the silver screen, spooking around before and after the action in a series of short films. Eventually The Shadow was fleshed out and given his own program and his own character magazine. Mostly, however, the horror hosts stuck around as background figures, the sole continuing character in a series of themed programs. The Whistler and the Mysterious Traveler were two of the more popular hosts on radio. Rod Sterling and Hitchcock were simply doing imitations of the less obnoxious of these hosts. For some reason the character of a narrator has disappeared from most serial fiction and the in-on-the-joke Horror Host went with it. It hung around in horror comics longest. Eventually the last of the horror hosts, Phantom Stranger and Doctor Graves, became adventure characters just as The Shadow did so many years before.

Superheroes: Without delving too far into ancient history, we can be fairly accurate in stating that the superheroes are a creation of the pulp fiction era. They have roots in the fantastic fiction of the Romantic era. And there clearly were superheroes in the Dime Novel era: boy scientists, masters of a thousand faces and indestructible Indian fighters. But they did somewhat die out with the Dime Novel era. (5) In a way they are an evolution of the Detective character, which has gone through some oddball phases. (See Glam Detective above and the various listings under Detective Mystery.) I’ve put them in the Serial Character Continuity heading because they were almost always headliners and almost always group thought into being. Most superheroes are variations between the themes first expressed as The Shadow and the Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger was a Hardboiled Detective grafted into the Western genre and then further grafted into a rather extreme version of the working-outside-the-law idiom. He lives by a special code of ethics, as all hardboiled types do. But he is essentially a normal guy and his opponents are similarly normal people. The Shadow, by contrast, has powers. At least on the radio he could turn invisible, or cloud men’s minds. The radio version of The Shadow fought crooks who were similarly fantastic, James Bond type villains and every non-Gothic monster north of Lovecraft. In the pulps The Shadow was a little more typical of the superheroes of pulp magazines. It’s been said that the pulp superheroes were more realistic than the comic heroes who followed. Or that the comic book heroes were more powerful. While there were distinct differences, it was more a matter of style. Pulp prose does not allow for much in the way of a break in the action. So anything the hero does has to come and go in under four sentences. This is the reason very few pulp heroes possessed the arsenal of abilities Superman has. Only Doc Savage came close. The comic book hero Batman, by contrast, is  typical of the old pulp heroes. In fact, Batman mugged the Green Hornet and the Phantom Detective for all of their stuff. (6) As with the Dime Novel heroes, there was a time when it seemed that they would go out of style. Thanks to the feedback loop of multiple mediums, and the endless supply of 12 year old boys, it looks like they will forever stay up to date. Weirdly, no new superhero has gained traction in nearly 40 years.

Villain: Making the bad guy the focal point of a continuing series did not start with cable television—although that seems to be their natural home. This is an outgrowth of the Superhero trend. It does have some precedent  in Dime Novels. Jesse James was one of the most popular characters in the Dime Novels. There was, of course, a real Jesse James, but he bore next to no resemblance to what was portrayed in Dime Novel fiction. The Dime Novel Jesse James was The Terminator in spurs. (Or The Terminator with a sex drive or the drunken version of The Terminator.) No one owned the character. (James was in no position to sue the publishers.) So the publishers outdid each other with ever more outlandish and lewd versions of him. It was the first popular anti-hero. Unfortunately the trend didn’t set well with some folks. A character who routinely gets away with rape, arson, theft, torture and murder seemed to some displaced in children’s literature. (7) So Jesse went away. It wasn’t until the pulp era that the next batch of bad guy-centric character magazines showed up—and all of them were take offs on Dr. Fu Manchu. Doctor Death and his pals didn’t last. The pre WWII comic hero boom saw anti-heroes as headliners again, in the form of Amazing Man, the Sub Mariner, Wonder Woman and The Claw. (8) As the war actually approached we saw a trend in the bad guys joining up with the Allies, reforming at least to the point of killing the right people. Even The Claw didn’t like Hitler. Since then the villain as center piece genre has popped up in comic books and other mediums. History says that it is hard to sustain.  

Fantastic Escapism: In television they call it a ‘High Concept’. The characters in these stories are interacting with a plot element or setting detail which does not exist in the real world.  At its more literary end, it’s a fleshed out analogy. Some of its trappings are ancient, borrowed from folklore. It’s still a fairy story, but you are changing the intended audience from children to adults. (9) This is really where pulp fiction and the pulp era gets its start. Whereas the Dime Novels were loaded with superheroes of a kind and all sorts of science fiction seeming devices, they were targeted primarily at juveniles. The first magazine to try aiming for an older audience with the same themes was Argosy, the original pulp magazine. It was such a draw that it spawned an entire industry. (10) Soon there were loads of different kinds of it, including…

                                                   

Fantasy: This is science fiction without the explanation. Or to put it proper historical order, science fiction is fantasy with an explanation. The more obtuse the explanation is, the harder degree of science fiction it is. It all belongs within the spectrum Fantastic Escapism. To narrow our terms, Fantasy in the pulp fiction sense deals with a single (or small group of) unreal elements. My horse talks. I am an advertising executive married to a witch. I am an astronaut who found a genie. Just to name some examples from television, where this genre has made a home.  Once Argosy had established the appeal of this genre, it began to quickly subdivide further. (11) Some of the more popular subgenres include…

Sword and Sorcery: Before it took on today’s Renaissance trappings, there was a lot of experimentation as to the settings. It’s a relation of Space Opera, albeit one where the explanation for everything is occult or supernatural. Conan the Barbarian was introduced in pulp pages, following the success of John Carter and other similar characters. It swaps some spit with Horror and the more imaginative tales could be considered Setting Horror. And it’s also a facts-be-damned type of Historical Setting Adventure. It was certainly present in the pulps, but took flight in paperback. Today much of it is tied to role playing games.

Jungle Stories: The entire genre is Tarzan and rip offs of Tarzan. Tarzan was to the pulps what Superman was to comics. The genre owes quite a bit to the English Explorer characters of the Romantic age. (Or the Victorian Age.) This could also fit under the Serial Character Continuity heading, although only Tarzan and Ka-zar and a few others ever headlined for extended periods of time. Mostly this sort of genre was bundled together in anthology packages with Explorer and other African setting material. It’s one of the few genres where the hero was as likely to be female as it was male. Girls in skins on your covers sells magazines.  For variety, sometimes the jungle moved from Africa to South America, Alaska or the Pacific. As a character type, it was so pervasive that every early comic book anthology had to have one.

Pulp Horror: The pulps certainly engaged in as much Gothic Horror as they could get away with. Ghosts, werewolves, Dracula and the other established types were not where the shelf space was, however. The pulps liked to make up their own monsters. No one did this better than H.P. Lovecraft, who had as much influence over his genre as Tarzan did. The pulps were loaded with Lovecraft imitators, all spinning yarns about creatures from outside conventional reality on a quest to impose their alien wills onto our world—to universally disastrous effect.  It gave the mayhem a stock explanation. And it still has its draw to this day. This is not to say that there wasn’t  variance in Pulp Horror or that it didn’t make use of traditional themes altogether. Zombies and witches were favorites, as were the mentally ill, ice pick wielding hunchbacks and packs of folks on very bad drug trips. Much of it was akin to the later Texas Chainsaw Massacre brand of cinema. Rounding out the Pulp brand of Horror were tales in which a story element changes from the mundane to the fantastic (the mirror talks) and then becomes malignant. It is this final area of the Pulp Horror spectrum which has had the most legs in other mediums. And it’s Stephen King’s entire living. There were also two notable variations…

• Weird Menace: This is a horror story for atheists. (The form was actually invented by an atheist.) It effectively bans the supernatural. Through the action of the plot what seems to be a fantastic event is revealed as having a perfectly rational explanation. (12) The horror twist is that the seemingly fantastic event encompasses a gruesome mass murder. To use an alternative shorthand, it’s a bloody detective story with an active perpetrator interfering with the investigation. In this construction, the form allows for one scene or element to go without an explanation. An editorial contrivance, Weird Menace turned out to be a very hard form to pull off well. To my knowledge, it was never done well and often came off as yet another group of escaped mental patients on a wilding spree tale. The cartoon program Scooby Doo has done more with this genre than anyone else.  On its face, the genre is very similar to the exploits of Houdini during his debunking spiritualists phase. That is not the genre’s origin nor the direction that it took. And it pales in pulp popularity when compared to…

• True Strange: The occult is real and is reported on as if it is news.  As a genre, this came in with the Story Papers and perhaps should have been included in the Tragedy listing. To be broad, we could dump all of the astrology magazines in here, too. As a narrow subgenre of Horror/Fantasy, it’s long suit is the personal account. This distinguishes it from Big Lie Newsfiction, inasmuch as it is done from a first person perspective and not AP style. It could also be seen as a variant of True Crime. True Strange is to Fantasy/Horror what the True Confessions genre is to Romance. The publication which proved the traction of this genre was Fate Magazine. But the pulp era was chock full of such publications, with variances into the prophetic properties of dreams and flat out New Age boosterism. A lot of it jumped ship to the supermarket tabloids during their heyday. This claptrap is still going strong and still evolving with the times. Currently there are several magazines in retail circulation offering firsthand accounts of the intervention of angels.

Science Fiction: By some measures everything in this broad category could be considered Science Fiction. Argosy published both science fiction and fantasy as did Weird Tales.  Prior to the pulps it was a field explored by only a handful of writers. Like most pulp fiction, its roots are in the Romantic period. All of Fantastic Escapism is surreal and Science Fiction is the least unreal part of the spectrum. Drawing further lines is picking nits. (And beyond our scope here.) Moreover, Science Fiction became a brand name, separate from Fantasy, with some distinct expectations but blurry fine lines. The pulps filled in everything that is today science fiction with paperback originals picking up exactly where they left off. Depending on the fashion of the time, pulps marketed Fantasy, Horror and Weird Menace as science fiction. They were also slingers of the following two subgenres…

Space Opera: Sometimes described as a translated Western, with aliens taking the place of Indians in various melodramas based on the cowboys and Indians formula. The pulp version was more akin to the Jungle story with planets plucked from the imagination standing in for more and more remote jungles. The sliding scale on Space Opera is that the more fantastic the protagonist’s abilities are, the more pedestrian the setting needs to be and the more fantastic the setting is, the closer to normal humans the heroes need to be. In both variations the plots were fairly straight forward and not generally the morality plays found in Westerns. Later versions allowed for more character study. The essence of this genre is that it remains grounded in something relatable. How popular this version of science fiction was when compared to other types is overstated, as is the popularity of…

B.E.M: Bug Eyed Monsters. More of a genre explored to death by science fiction movies than it ever was print. King Kong may not have originated in the pulps, but it was a product of a pulp author. Sometimes it was just a cover theme. (Giant stuff makes for an appealing cover design. Add a scantily clad female for extra points.) The magazines which went in for a heavy dose of this had usually started with a more high minded purpose. They were out to be literate, poetic, cultural commentary with some aspirations of exploring the big themes from Popular Mechanics. And then they read their sales figures. Suddenly, it was bring on the dancing girls time—the pulp magazine version being blaring large vulgarities  with babes in peril. In short, science fiction magazines were easy to get wrong. Planet Stories mixed in the BEMs with Space Opera and Horror and stuck around forever. Marvel Tales went BEM big and thudded about, appearing ony sporadically. BEMs were either a sign of a magazine in its death throws or a publisher with a limited commitment to the science fiction genre.

Themed Adventure: Pulps didn’t invent the Adventure yarn, but they did act as  scouts for compelling settings and situations.  Most of the big themes are somewhat ancient and many would fall under the category of Historical Adventure. At its base, it’s a travelogue with a task. This is the genre of Pirate themed tales, of big game hunts, of explorations for the sake of geography, paleontology and archaeology.  The general Themed Adventure pulps did them all and were for a time the biggest category in this segment. If we wanted to be more broad in our definition, it would include almost all of Detective Mystery. There were also themes based not just on time frame or location, but also on trends in technology. Pulp fiction is all about novelty.  Beyond general and historical adventure, the following specialty genres became Pulp mainstays…

Aviation Adventure: I covered this somewhat in the Serial Character Continuity section above. The character magazines in this genre were its final evolution.  Pulp authors liked to write stories about the latest gadget in Popular Mechanics. The lag time between a technological breakthrough having  been first theoretically illustrated and its subsequent deployment by pulp fiction writers was a matter of typing speed. Of particular interest early on were all manner of experimental aircraft. The more neato-keen the thing looked in Popular Mechanics the more widespread its adoption by pulp characters—often regardless of the innovation’s plausibility as an item to ever appear in the real world. No matter. There was no shortage of experimental aircraft—this month’s gyro-copter will be replaced by next month’s flying wing, or zeppelin or rocket jet. As with the character magazines on this theme, the genre fit a near future science fiction niche.

Boy’s Adventure: This genre enjoyed a long life in the Story Papers and Dime Novels. At its heart were boy detectives and boy scientists and boy cowboys, a cadre of juvenile heroes whose prowess at their craft granted them equality with adults. As such, it is purely an escapist wish-fulfillment genre. And the genre is still with us, although it was lost to the pulp fiction periodical universe. Instead it found a home in the hardback universe, most notably in the forms of Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Danny Dunn libraries. This was part of the trend in improving children’s literature which eventually spelled the end of the Dime Novels.  Although missing from pulps and paperbacks, the Boy’s Adventure genre did have a revival in comic books and comic strips.

Men’s Adventure: Some people would like to live in Disneyland and some people would like to live in a world stripped bare of hypocrisy. There are people who like things nice, clean and safe and then there are people who believe that all ideals and absolutes are illusions built on idiots’ consensus.  Are these positions diametrically opposed or are they simply heading in different directions? And is there room on Earth for both idioms to happily coexist? (Is there a middle ground for the American Dream?) Other than this, the Men’s Adventure genre is an off color form of historical fiction. The Men’s Adventure genre got its start in a magazine called True, which was a big hit in the latter stages of WWII. (The segment persisted from the late 1940s through the early 1980s, peaking in the late 1950s.) Much of the Men’s Adventure genre fiction swam inside magazines dedicated in greater parts to lifestyle features, blue collar commentary and pictures of naked women. Most Men’s Adventure magazines triangulated in tone and content between True, Playboy and Confidential. They didn’t know it, but they were transitioning into porn—eventually fetish porn. As a distinct brand of fiction, it had some interestingly bleak conventions: You are powerless and sexually inadequate; Everyone is corrupt; The heroes are generally stuck in situations they have little control over. Situations are resolved via progressing through dismal options: suck up, sell out, destroy or live and let die. Often our hero’s motives amount to nothing more noble than a desire to grab quick cash, get laid or simply extricate himself from a situation.  Welcome to the Baton Death March of 1950s Men’s Adventure fiction: billed as true and chock full of a contest between blue collar relativists and blue collar right wing ideologues.

(Welcome to the land of remaindered slick fiction. Many of these themes started out in the better magazines which ran fiction. Once one magazine ran neo-determinism, others followed suit. And the same thing happened with relativism, concurrently. Writers, being pack animals, soon started cranking out  submits in the same vein. And soon it’s overstocked in the better markets and then it’s passé.  So this material finds its way to the Men’s Adventure market, a flunk out medium if ever there was one. We cover this genre extensively on the HIL-GLE website under the heading of Real Nazi Sex UFO Man-Eater Cults in the Modern Thrills pulp history pages. Sticking a naked woman in a story which had been rejected elsewhere is the origin of this genre. Once it got rolling, the material spawned the following sub genres…)

Nymphomaniac World War Two:  At the time these tales first cropped up, WWII was fairly fresh in everyone’s mind. During WWII pulps such as Argosy and True made their livings by detailing enemy atrocities against prisoners and civilians. It was graphic, gritty stuff and one would expect that collections of WWII tales that followed would be equally realistic. It’s hard to explain why this wasn’t the case. The trend began in Men’s Adventure pulps who were making the transition from pulp paper to slick. It starts with WWII stories of personal corruption and official mismanagement—an airing of dirty laundry after the shooting has stopped and the war is won. Much of it was told in a tone similar to that of the Hardboiled Detective story. From disclosure of Allied imperfection, the field then progresses to tales of hidden Nazi hordes of valuables, OSS missions and other now-it-can-be-told fare. Then the nymphomaniac females start straying into the battlefield with regularity, including armed female units and other elements which frankly never existed. It all becomes fairly lewd and improbable and, on occasion,  bloody, in very short order. Our heroes are not exactly good guys and the happy endings are never assured. This became a core genre, only to be replaced by lewd retellings of other historical events set in the Civil War and the West. It also progressed to the then current Korean and Viet Nam conflicts and occasionally strayed behind the iron curtain. (Plus Cuba, Central and South America.) It also became peppered with science fiction elements, weapons which never existed or, my favorite, GIANT ARMED WOMEN. The weirdness of this genre spawned the following…

Giant Ants Ate My Girlfriend:  I Left My Girlfriend To Die At The Hands of Drug Pirates might be a better name for this stupefying take on the BEM genre. There are two essential elements to this genre. The first is the propensity for pulp fiction heroes to use the stray naked women they encounter as human shields. This is the near the conclusion of a trend in stories wherein the main character gets killed at the end or fails to halt the undoing of the woman he is out to rescue. Second, it was part of a migration away from WWII or any historical pretext. Our heroes are on uncharted islands or remote beaches. In true Pulp Horror style, hoards of normally harmless creatures turn man-eater. Or they would have turned man-eater, had our hero not bravely hurled his gal pal at them first. It became quite the pulp chic theme for a time, eventually degenerating into no-hero-whatsoever tales of women grinding. It was very similar to the craze in Splatter Porn which had swept over the True Crime pulps in their last phase and somewhat concurrent with…

Thug Tales: Our hero is a Mafia hit man. Or a gun runner. Or a government paid assassin. Or a drug smuggler. (Hero is a drug smuggler who discovers that his activities somehow dovetail with that of a white slavery ring.) This bordered on being a rehash of the Crime Glorification trend, with the exception that most of the heroes were lower level thugs as opposed to made wiseguys or kingpins. (Apparently the kingpins either didn’t want to write about their own exploits or our writers didn’t know how to make the in and outs of crime management exciting enough.) This trend was inspired by the success of The Godfather and marked the end of fiction in the Men’s Adventure magazines, all of which either folded shop or simply became Penthouse clones.

Railroad Adventure: Ported over from the Dime Novels and never missed a beat. The genre was small, consistent and very long lived. It covered working on the railroad, railroad construction and rail travel, shifting focus over time to also cover the hobby of model railroading. Most of the longer lived magazines shed fiction between 1950 and 1970. As a genre of fiction it faded with the building of the highway system and was banished outright with the rise of commercial air travel. Railfan culture has persisted into the present and a few titles which started as rail pulps are still going today. (The same can also be said of at least one magazine which started as an Air pulp.)

Sea Adventures: It may not have been the first identified subgenre of Themed Adventure to establish itself, but it was extremely early. They set sail with the 1890s and stuck around consistently through the pulp era. The theme covers various eras, types of conflict and has a broad choice of settings. For a time there was a fad in Pirate tales, which expanded the flotilla of pulps under this flag plying the newsstands. But there were always at least two themed anthologies in the fleet. The Sea books were never an armada, with at most eight titles at the height of the pulp era in the 1920s.  Although the type of story was as ancient as it can get, themed anthologies of Sea Adventures were unique to pulp magazines. Several of the anthologies had narrative hosts, similar to the later Horror Comics. Then WWII hit and the entire genre sank, never to return. It was never a major genre in paperbacks or another medium. It just died, as did…

Sports Fiction: Pulp publishers were in on sports fandom fairly early on. The only place one still sees the words Street & Smith today are on volumes of their pre season football guides. Like movie fan magazines, astrology books, comics and porn, sports fandom is one of the offshoot ventures pulp publishers typically went in for.(13)  Piggybacking on the pre-seasonal appearance of various fan guides were themed anthologies of sports fiction. At the height of the pulp era (1890-1920) there were a few sports themed monthlies, but most of them were annuals. (The original Sports Illustrated was a failed pulp title.) There was a football annual, a baseball annual, a hockey annual and a basketball annual—all appearing at the starts of those seasons. Pulps were also in on some off color sports, such as wrestling and car racing. Mix in some efforts attempting to exploit the popularity of outdoor participation sports like hunting and fishing and it was a fairly robust sector. Pulp bulwarks Fiction House, Columbia Publications, Street & Smith and Macfadden all had longstanding efforts in this segment and most of the other substantial publishers at least took a stab at it. The mainstays of this genre seem to have been Football and Boxing, which together accounted for one half of the titles. Coverage of boxing had come in with the Story Papers and was the first professional sport of the pulp fiction era. (The actual first professional sport in modern times was horse racing, which has never elicited much literary interest.) All coverage in sports started with boxing and expanded out from there. The pulp format, being something of a late player, started with the Football boom of the turn of the century, appended on Boxing and then doubled back to cover the other sports once the segment had proven itself. There is also some relationship between the decline of Boy’s Adventure and the rise of Sports Fiction. With the exception of the participation sports, the whole field timed out with the end of WWII. There were some comic books in the genre, but none lasted long. With the folding of the last of the armpit slicks, the genre of sports fiction went down for the count.  

True Combat: Like the Aviation themed trend, grew out of interest in WWI. The Aviation trend was actually the glamorous end of this genre. The genre initially had a following which included both people who had served in the war as well as juveniles who were attracted to its (now faded) patina of romance. The letters columns were filled with missives from veterans seeking to get back in contact with people they had served. Early true combat pulps were loaded with firsthand accounts, with repeat authors building a following. Then the true pros started filtering in and the genre began to sub-divide. Beyond aviation, the genre spawned magazine categories covering tales of the French Foreign Legion and the Civil War. The rollback in interest started with the onset of real war news in the 1930s. War of any kind as a fiction setting then faded, only coming back first in the WWII Men’s Adventure magazines (see above) and a handful of comic book titles starting in the late 1950s. As with most Themed Adventure types, it was never really the exclusive providence of pulp fiction and has long been a mainstay in all mediums. As has been the historical pattern, interest in True Combat themed comic books ended with the start of Desert Shield. Real war has a tendency to sideline interest in fictional war.

Western: A purely American genre, the Western got its start contemporaneously with the actual old west era. Pulp fiction in the form of Dime Novels were read by frontier schoolboys and helped make a celebrity out of Buffalo Bill. It was a fictional reality which became frozen in time. How reflective of reality it is has always been open to question. There have probably been more short stories and novels published about the 1840s to 1880s then there were days in the era. Dime Novels in the genre were borderline fantastic and many of the conventions that have evolved are more built on myth than reflections of any historical reality.  As a genre it is and always has been a collective nostalgia trip, a simplified setting for the staging of morality plays. The pulp fiction version of the genre encompasses all that the genre currently is. It came from the Dime Novels to the Pulps and was delivered fully formed to all other media. If anything, the pulps were responsible for the development of what came to be known as the adult western.  As a genre in Dime Novels, Pulps, Digests and Paperback originals, Westerns probably comprise 90% of the titles issued within the Themed Adventure heading. (14) It was in Movies, Radio and Television at the births of those mediums. And then television beat it to stinking death. During the 1950s Hollywood created such a glut of this material that it pounded flat whatever further demand for it there may ever be. By the mid 1960s the public became sick of it.  New material in this genre has been rare ever since. My belief is that the constant feedback loop of this material in all mediums crowds out the need for new treatments. (Max Brand is a fine writer and new works of his are constantly being put into print—and he’s been dead since WWII.) Others contend that the Western has been in decline since the rise in popularity of…

Detective Mystery: In pulp fiction terms, neither of these two words has any set meaning. Both are meant to denote a contemporary urban setting adventure tale.  At the heart of the narrative is a logic puzzle. But that’s just the way to bet. Not much can be certain and often the package contains more horror and thuggery than anything else.  As a genre description inherited from the Dime Novels and Story Papers it generally meant something Sherlock Holmes-like. (Or Nick Carter Master Detective-like.) During the pulp era it expanded to the character oriented cozy, to the police procedural, to…

Hardboiled Detective: The trappings of this genre grew to the point of being ripe for parody. But people liked it. The ugly truth is that the cynical, iconoclastic low lifes with a code were largely the fantasy projections of Ivy League educated elitists. Your Hardboiled Detective was a fake working man telling the real working class off on behalf of his Ivory Tower creators. (That’s the actual origin.) Sometimes amidst the snappy patter, social commentary and character study a few details as to the mystery can go missing. It largely replaced the drawing room mystery. You can make a fairly good hardboiled dick by having your character act exactly the opposite of Sherlock Holmes. Everything said, having more voice for the character and less plot entanglements is the real key to pulling this off. Although derived from the realist school of literature, none of them were all that realistic.  A stock character is easy enough to conjure, however the spectrum of hero personalities are fairly broad: both Perry Mason and Sam Spade are considered hardboiled. This differentiation in personality types led to the Superhero by way of the…

Defective Detective: Hardboiled Detectives are an eccentric lot. As the genre became threadbare, playing with the theme seemed compulsory. Next stop is the downright dysfunctional. Sadly, this character type has not left us. About a third of all TV and popular fiction detectives are now afflicted with mental maladies that would make them unemployable. Nero Wolfe was perhaps the best of this lot, suffering from nothing more obnoxious than agoraphobia, physical laziness or an extreme dislike of people not under his direct control. Another ploy was to make them weird, as in ethnic. Cue Charlie Chan and Mister Moto, creations which would label the anglo authors closet klansmen if crafted today. One pulp move was to have the detective suffer from some sensory or physical impairment. The execution on detective tales using other than able bodied heroes magically avoided any attempt to validate their humanity. Invariably the blind ones sprouted new heightened senses, leading weirdly to the first actually super powered heroes. Other deformities were used as convincing  excuses for getting into hiding places and positioning weapons. Most of these variations on the theme went nowhere, as they deserved. The last variation was to turn our hero into a terrorist, as Edgar Wallace did with his Three Just Men. It was the popularity of Wallace’s work which led to the wave of pulp vigilantes. On the other side of the spectrum was…

Crime Glorification:  Also known as Gangster stories. Hollywood loved gangsters. The pulps were no different.  It’s pulp fiction DNA to exploit any popular archetype tramping across the public mind, dating back to Dime Novel treatments of Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Although they avoided playing up the exploits of real gangsters, there was a Jazz Age boom in crime lifestyle pulps. The fictional focus was on easy money, the corruption of the authorities and the freedom afforded to people beyond the reach of the law. The Gangsters truly were masters of their own fate. (Unlike the shop girls and hourly workmen who read pulps.) The genre even sub-divided to cover Gun Molls. AND THEN THE F.B.I. SHOWED UP AND TOLD THE PULP PUBLISHERS TO CUT IT OUT. Literally. (Harold Hersey has a particularly vivid account.) Crime Glorification went on, shifted to the True Crime pulps, but the fictional genre was done. (The feds eventually cracked down on Hollywood, too.) It next cropped up in comic books in the late 1940s. Again, it led to a crackdown. As with pulps, most Crime Glorification today is done under the True Crime disguise.

Espionage: One would think that prior to Ian Fleming, this would have been a fairly realistic variant on the detective theme. The Pulp era coincided with the careers of some exceptional real spies. And there certainly was no shortage of international intrigue going on to model plots from. But no. The movie version of James Bond is somewhat on the tame end of the mayhem spectrum routinely paraded in the Espionage pulps. The genre perhaps belongs in the Serial Character Continuity heading since the better remembered ones were headliners in their own magazines. Or they could belong as a subclass of Superheroes, because most of them had extraordinary abilities. (Almost all of them were at least WWI aces. Or had been.) Actual spying—as in stealing things or gathering intelligence, seldom happened. Instead, mid-res secret invasions were uncovered, phantom squadrons were shot down, entire cities were boiled to death. All before page 40. And I haven’t even touched the Purple Invasion—the entire United States invaded and enslaved. Spying? No! More like semi-official vigilante action on a strategic level. If the body count didn’t match the word count, then the author wasn’t trying hard enough. Science fiction elements abounded, the plots indistinguishable from the later group superhero comic books. All that was missing were alien invasions. Word for word, the bloodiest pulps ever written.

True Crime: Typically this is not a genre of fiction, although its variants are. I’ve previously placed the whole shooting match under our Tragedy category. Not that I am the final authority, but two particular variations of this seem specifically notable as fiction. Since I believe they are entirely lacking in moral teaching value (they are not tragedy), I have chosen to list them here. (Also, I honestly forgot about them when I was composing our first posting.) Whatever it may be, True Crime and its mutations Big Lie Newsfiction and Gossip were mainstays of the Pulp era and are thriving today in print and  other mediums. There are, however, two offshoots of True Crime which have bitten the dust…

Splatter Porn: Not all real crime is True Crime. Most of it is just police blotter fodder. Even back in the 1890s people shot each other all the time. In order for mere murder to aspire to the designation of True Crime it requires a little Lizzie Borden action. Of course not all True Crime is murder. But if you want to make it in True Crime, a mere stick up or a succession of bank robberies isn’t enough. Dress as a ballerina. As odd as that mixture sounds, this is the tame version of True Crime. It competes with the regular news via selective theme choice-- traditionally much less squeamish about sex. Society orgies and mass murder are not evolutions at all on the True Crime theme, they are where the genre got its start. Given such a lofty editorial stance, it’s not hard to see how things might degenerate over the course of time. But it wasn’t a straight plunge into the abyss, or even a linear progression. To take you back to the Police Gazette era (1840s), True Crime got its start by being literally more graphic than conventional newspapers. News is news and what differentiated the True Crime rags was that they were filled with line art explaining the mayhem. Which is to say that they were Illustrated Newspapers, a form of Story Paper. (Very similar to the old National Enquirer, but with realistic cartoons.)  Just after the Civil War, publications gained the capacity to replicate photographs. Newspapers slowly caught up with this. By the time WWI rolled around, most newspapers were capable of publishing photographs. And the newspapers weren’t shy about plastering their pages with bloody scenes. This sucked the wind out of the True Crime publications, caused the genre to fold shop. Those True Crime publications that did hold on either stuck to sex—the only theme the newspapers wouldn’t touch—or became Detective Mystery pulps, mixing in fiction with their rehashes of months old atrocities. Or did all of it. True Crime didn’t come back until after WWII when, for reasons which it would take another whole posting to attempt to explain, all of American Popular Culture became entirely sanitized. The bloody photos vanished from the newspapers. And from the movies. At this point in their evolution, pulps were no longer mainstream but rather countercultural, so True Crime in all its bloody fury came back. It soon became a very crowded, spot color, photo offset field. It was during this time of proliferation that a race to the bottom started. To be short, the True Crime magazines began presenting photo recreations of rape killings. With only occasional diversions from the Son of Sam and the Manson Family, this became the stock and trade of magazines with the words ‘Detective Journal’ or ‘Official Police’  on their covers. Gone were the admittedly limited variations in editorial offerings. It was rape porn. And it stayed that way until the end.  In a way, the onset and eventual total emersion of this trend could be seen in the pervasive presence of one single True Crime stock theme…

White Slavery: Human trafficking is real. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the increase in international air travel, there is probably more human trafficking today than there has ever been. And much of it is sex crime related. That is the dismal honest truth. That said, the True Crime pulps were utterly full of beans. Unless historians have simply missed it, there were no organized criminal gangs running around in the 1890s through the 1930s kidnapping housewives who were subsequently then sold off for sex nightly to New York private club plutocrats. (Or Arabs.) By their nature, the True Crime vehicles had a tendency to exaggerate. This well used story trope was made from whole cloth. And it was used, spin the bottle style, by one True Crime pulp or another at least once a month for 40 years. To understand the theme’s attraction one has to know the pulp audience. (15) No one is picking up a pulp magazine, even a True Crime one, to become informed. You grab a pulp to escape. True Crime is actually a form of Horror Fiction—and as such it has a base constituency of shop girls and housewives. That quite a few of the True Crime magazines were put out by the Romance editor is no accident nor dimwitted act of economy.  Taken in its probably intended light, the White Slavery story is a girl-oriented fantasy. The housewife is removed from her drudgery in a guilt free manner and whisked off to a life of having her charms bid for by the wealthy and accomplished. It’s just on the right side of lewd and beats a routine of saving the cooking fat. The White Slavery theme did appear through the 1960s, but with much less frequency… at least in True Crime. What seems to have happened to this theme is that it was absorbed into the pantheon of Romance, which since the 1920s had been broadening to include more violent and salacious material. Romance did this at the expense of True Crime, which steadily lost its female readership. True Crime magazines muddled through the WWII years reporting on Axis atrocities. Once the war was over, they fumbled about until finally hitting on Rape Porn. By that time they had no female audience to lose. True Crime was one of the offshoot genres whose appeal was taken away by the constant evolution and expansion of…

Romance: Then as now, this was the biggest and most attractive genre of fiction. The genre was a battle ground for publishers of hard backs, slick woman’s magazines and the pulps. Arguably the hard backs and the Red Books of the day drew the better material. (They paid more.) But until the onset of the paperback era, pulp magazines dominated the genre. (16) The economics simply favored the pulp model. Romance existed in hardbound form from the start of the novel as a form. A product of the Romantic era, most novels were romances of a form. And there was a period of clapboard produced popular romance novels. Technically all of the early Dime Novels were romances, which meant they were all somewhat escapist. But there was a dead zone in the production of Romance as a genre which occurred after the Dime Novels became pegged as degenerate children’s literature. Failing to  fill that void was the short Story Paper boom,  Lady’s Flyers,  and the inclusion of syndicated fiction in newspapers. It was also a staple genre of the woman’s magazines, which pre-dated the pulps by ten years. None of these forms addressed the massive audience that the early Dime Novels had proven was there. Once the pulp magazine format proved viable, Romance was the next genre in. It would not be an exaggeration to say that during the Pulp era, 90% of the material in this genre was printed in pulp magazine form.  Much of what appeared in the pulp pages is not that dissimilar to what one might find in modern romance novels. The settings were both modern and historic, the themes and conflict types common to domestic melodrama. One might have qualms about quality, but the pulps weren’t the worst paying markets. (Lending Library, Syndicated Fiction and the lowest tier hard bound houses paid much worse than the average Romance pulp. As far as pulps went, the Romance pulps paid near the top rate.) On top of dominating in terms of volume economics, pulps were willing to move the ball through innovation and expansions in theme. Some of the successful long term Romance variants included…

Flapper Fiction: Romance with the spurty bits left in is nothing new in popular literature. Lewd bombastic flights of bad word prose were a mainstay of the late Romantic clapboard novels. (It  appeared in the English and French markets, but failed to surface in North America.) The pulp take on this tactic was that the fun and games were written from the woman’s perspective. Initially it was woman’s erotica written for women by women. Some of this further evolved into the Sex Novel, which became a bulwark of the Lending Library segment. Although there were experiments at doing everything (and not necessarily everything correctly), the general consensus in pulps of this type was to run up to the finish line but not across it. And that tactic seems to have been a result of trial and errors at gauging audience taste.  As fringe-worthy as this risqué genre seems, it was the weapon by which the pulps initially captured the Romance audience. Being slightly naughtier than the slick fiction, hard bound fiction, radio and movies was THE PULP TACTIC. (In this case, they stumbled onto it.) At its height in the 1920s, Flapper Fiction sailed a dozen or so pulp titles—some of them twice a month. Once the fad faded, the majority of the Flapper titles settled into the just-a-side-of-sleaze more than normal segment of the market—a segment they had just established. Beyond the Sex Novel, there were another two variations. When done in a somewhat High Camp style, this material had equal appeal to both sexes. Flapper Fiction in this vein often ran in tandem with humor pieces. Sometimes the same editorial package would do double duty as both the padding around naked pictures of girls in a men’s magazine as well as the contents of a female slanting Flapper Fiction anthology. (17) Having done nothing more than removed pictures and switched covers, our happy pulp magnate would then laugh his ass off all the way to the bank—confident that there was no overlap in readership. The second variant is more a grafting of tone than it is of theme, and actually constitutes a full subgenre…

Realistic Stories: As a deliberate editorial policy, this was a one publisher trend. But the trend has deeper roots. The essence of Flapper Fiction is an unsentimental accounting of the  human condition. The intent was to demystify the subject of sex. In practice it reduced everything into psychobabble and schoolyard biology, but it did have high aims. The idea behind Realistic Stories was to take this unsentimental tone and demystifying objective and apply it to other types of human conflicts. One catch:  the story had to be about something that could happen to a normal person. The narratives ran from illustrations of daily nuisances (my neighbor’s dog barks all night) to existential crisis (I owe money to the mob).  Or they were detailing a problem that happens in a specific trade. How you can lose more money than you thought you had at risk in an investment scheme was a common topic. Outside of Young’s Magazine, which was the flagship of this trend, much of this material wound up packaged with the High Camp Flapper Fiction and humor. At its best, it was either an expose in fiction form or it was a story about an adult problem other than sex. It opened the door to pulps publishing one time magazines on intriguing subjects. None of this approached the fiction as expose high water mark of The Grapes of Wrath, more like My Life in a Love Cult.  Much of it was obviously material which numerous literary  or slick fiction magazine editors had taken  passes on, but which the pulp editor was willing to run simply because it was a nice piece of writing. And then there were the treatments for a movie script or play (undoubtedly awaiting adaptation as a musical) that the pulps occasionally ran when they felt the need to have Hollywood or Broadway aspirations. The business and investing genres spawned some short-lived titles.  Given its instructive nature, it possibly should have been filed under Tragedy, as perhaps should…

True Confessions: For the most part, the same subject matter as True Crime and Flapper Fiction, only written in first person. It was massively sentimental, highly charged melodrama.  Flapper Fiction was all fun and games done in a detached manner, whereas True Confessions was fretting each turn and  wallowing in the consequences. Like Romance in general, True Confessions had female lead characters and focused on emotional issues. This bent of Romance was known, primarily, for its penchant for the perverse. You never knew what sort of person was going to erupt with what kind of sob story. Lesbianism, drug addiction, unplanned unwed pregnancy, violent relationships and health issues were the common themes, almost from the start. The True Confessions format itself was an outgrowth of the letters section in Physical Culture magazine. This magazine was Bernarr MacFadden’s health and fitness as a political cause soap box. In MacFadden’s political universe, all biological functions were to be revered and understood. So MacFadden encouraged the readers of Physical Culture to send in their accounts of  biological issues. This quickly became the most popular department in Physical Culture.  MacFadden then launched True Story, which was essentially the Physical Culture letters department writ large. It also was a hit and led to the launching of dozens of titles using the same gimmick. Per MacFadden, it  led to the launching of the True Crime segment. (In any case, MacFadden expanded the idea to cover additional subjects. MacFadden’s competitors generally stuck to flooding the True Confessions segment.) In its earliest forms, this trend constituted a revival of the epistolary Romance in short story form.  Most magazines within this sector did not demand that the conceit of being written as a letter be maintained at all costs. Only the pretext that the story was true or written by amateurs was universally affirmed.  The pretext was, of course, false. Even MacFadden’s magazines were cranked out by professional writers. Although the form never migrated to other mediums, it had tremendous longevity in magazine form. The True Confessions magazines were with us until very recently. (18) When combined with Flapper Fiction, True Confessions constituted a monopolist block on the Romance market. Pulps were the only place you could come to for such things. And there was a third pulp proprietary Romance genre…

Western Romance:  Like Flapper Fiction, Weird Menace and True Confession, this genre originates as the result of deliberate editorial manufacture as opposed to literary evolution spawned by reading the tea leaves of circulation figures. Harold Hersey, who also gave us the Gun Molls trend, claims to have thought it up himself. The idea of Themed Romance was not as obvious as it might seem. And it may have been driven by his publisher’s circulation figures almost justifying the addition of both a Romance title and a Western title. Why not both?  Hersey was the first. Western Romance was an early pulp variation, slightly predating Flapper Fiction. It was an immediate hit, prompting every publisher to jump in with a quick clone. As forms of Romance go, it isn’t particularly domestic. In many of its elements  the form more resembles the Themed Adventure segment, except that the protagonists are always female and the setting is always the old west. There was a Canadian variation of this, a two magazine trend for tales of the Northwest in turn of the century times. As a large genre Western Romance outlasted every other created genre sans True Confessions, and the Pulp era itself, with the last two magazines finally folding shop in the 1960s. It continued as a trend in the Digests and is still a popular segment in Romance paperbacks to this day. Today’s spate of NASCAR Romances are its direct spawn. Weirdly the form has never migrated beyond the printed page.

Pulp Sleaze: Not all pulp publishers are pornographers, but all pornographers are pulp publishers. Pulps often added a patina of sleaze to most of their genre headings, denoting it with Flapper Fiction trade words such as Racy, Spicy, Saucy and French. And when it came to padding out a magazine which was essentially a sandwich for smutty pictures, the publishers either recycled wares from their straight pulps or relied upon genre fiction styles. Sometimes you have to wonder which came first—was pornography the product and the pulp magazine its spin off or was it the other way around. And there were levels of pornography, the basics being pretty easy to fathom. The publisher of DC Comics at one time ran a pulp porn house which featured genre fiction surrounding dirty photographs, genre fiction interspersed with particularly lewd and violent line drawings and genre fiction with slightly less erotic drawings—sometimes essentially the same magazine with different graphic treatments. The publisher of Marvel Comics produced humor cartoon magazines and humor cartoon magazines interspersed with nudie pictures—again being essentially the same magazine with a different cover and title. The most blatant case was with the porn title Whisper and the celebrity scandal expose magazine Confidential. Confidential was just Whisper without the girls—yet  Whisper sold in the mid 100s of thousand range and Confidential sold in the millions. All of this somewhat demonstrates the economics of the industry. You can charge more for the porn, but your audience is going to be somewhat limited. (Did I mention that pornography was illegal?) Because of its high margins, porn was also very competitive. High registry printing and good editorial carried a pornographer fairly far. In order to amortize some of the publisher’s costs, they would repackage the material in clean form. And there was little fear of audience overlap. Also, because the production of pornographic materials was a legally iffy business, it did require a cover. (A legal business which could claim to be consuming the same materials that a pornographer does.) Running a comic book or pulp magazine publishing house was the best cover there is. Beyond doing the above, Pulp Sleaze had a few notable subgenres…

Pin Up: Pin Up magazines were near porn, generally pictures of girls in bathing suits. Community standards usually demanded that the form be dressed up a bit and the post office had a regulation as to word counts. So most of them had some sort of theme. To take this back a step, there were several types of publishers. Pin Up magazines were the products of low end litho houses. These houses had a product mix of illegal pornography, movie magazines and humor magazines. Given that this is a litho set up and none of these magazines are particularly fiction oriented or on pulp stock, one might argue that they are outside of our topic. Alex Hillman, who we cover on the HIL-GLE website, published high end litho, low end litho, pulp digests and comic books, so some say he is not a pulp publisher at all. He did, however, publish a fleet of True Confessions, True Crime and Movie Fan magazines—which he called pulps. Bernarr MacFadden, who launched the True Confessions genre and published dozens of pulp fiction titles—and who is generally considered the second Pulp Magnate after Munsey—seldom published on pulp paper. The majority of his magazines were either litho or full color litho on magazine coated stock. Unless the publisher owned a press battery, most of them published the same exact material in several forms. When it came to the Pin Up magazines, it was a genre plied by firms with some litho expertise. With some rare exceptions, the Pin Up genre was not the publisher’s mainstay. It’s a sideline. The Pin Up magazines took one of three forms, depending on what the publisher’s core business actually was. The first form I will call the Printed Burlesque. If there’s an attempt at disguise on these, it’s either as a humor magazine or a Movie Fan magazine. These are girlie photos, as smutty as the publisher thinks he can get away with.  Most of these magazines are advertising vehicles for much harder smut. The second type of Pin Up rag I call Photo Life. These publications are either disguised as photography studies periodicals (figure studies) or are attempting to come off as exceptionally downscale versions of Life Magazine. Other than titles, the Printed Burlesque and the Photo Life magazines are chock full of the tamer shots in a probably hard core photo shoot.  Pin Up’s final variation was what I call the West Hollywood. This is a downscale Movie Fan magazine, full of bust shots of aspiring actresses. It’s done in Movie Magazine style, only its populated by women whose connection to the silver screen is somewhat tenuous. As a form, the Pin Up magazine emerged early on, although the magazines themselves were fairly short lived. A few titles changed genres as time went on, but nothing that started as a Pin Up magazine wound up looking like Playboy. Instead, a lot of these magazines were fairly close in editorial to…

Humor: The Pulp era alone produced no less than a dozen long lived humor titles. The form had actually gained traction in the Story Papers and moved from there.  A humor feature or two was an expectation in all magazines, and to that extent pulp magazines were no different.  English magazines such as Puck were very popular with the American audience and many of the earlier efforts were simply imitations. Eventually an American form took shape, generally relying on satire and parody in its longer features. Most were laced with spot cartoons. In many ways they were very similar to what the National Lampoon and Mad Magazine are. The older magazines had more short stories and occasional outbreaks of essay writing. And then there were the joke books, like Captain Billy’s Whizbang, Smokehouse and 1000 Jokes. If there was a pulp tactic in humor, it was to generally mix it in with other genres—primarily Flapper Fiction and Pin-Up. It also became a feature in the general interest anthologies of the earliest part of the era. Later the pulps were purveyors of the College Humor form (like National Lampoon) , where humor departments and off taste cartoons were the lead features in a mix of Pin-Up and news commentary fare.

Counterculture:  Although the form is said to have erupted in the 1960s, it has roots dating back to the Flapper Fiction of the 1920s and the early Digest and Paperback booms. In Pulp Fiction terms counterculture amounts to lesbianism, drug use and fast living. There was always an undercurrent of it in True Crime, True Confessions and Flapper Fiction, but it didn’t really sprout out until the Digest became established as a viable format. (Starting slightly before the outbreak of WWII, sleazy slim novels on all manner of sidetrack themes began arriving in tobacco stores, gas stations and the odd newsstand. Regardless of their specific area of sensational exploitation, most of these novels followed the accepted construction as first outlined for the Sex Novel by Woodford. (He should know. He wrote enough of them.) Girl gets sick of whatever rut she is in.  Goes off and tries something new, occasionally encountering a consequence here or there. At about the 37,000 word count, she orchestrates a return to her old life, this time certain that things will be somehow more satisfying. Admittedly this is a weak construction. Having your heroine die from a botched abortion or beaten to death by a drug dealer or simply sitting out her time in a home for unwed mothers was not what the readers wanted. These novels are escape vehicles. The writer is trotting out a web of cheap thrills. At some point the ride through the fun house just ends and the reader gets out of the car unhurt. Unlike real counterculture, the idea was never to advocate and seldom to understand. Real porn and real counterculture eventually wiped the form out.

The forms described above floated the popular fiction universe nearly to the present day. Almost all of them have recycled or mutated further. We will have one further posting just on the genres and then we will cover their relations and current status in future posts. As with everything, please feel free to pick nits and call me out when I stray. I don’t know everything.

Notes: (With True Crime Headlines)

(1) HORATIO ALGER WAS A CHILD MOLESTER. A convicted one, at that. In my view, all of his stories are child molestation fantasies. Traditionally, the Pluck and Luck genre is thought to read ‘a young man works hard at a menial job, maintaining a cheery attitude and cultivating a reputation for honesty and eventually he becomes wealthy and famous and powerful.’ That isn’t really how Horatio Alger’s stories read. Instead, our cheery waif grabs himself a menial job, which he works long and hard at, until—this is the key part—he has the opportunity to endanger his life for the benefit of a wealthy person. After that, the grateful plutocrat elevates our man’s circumstances. Much of Pluck and Luck was a reaction against the slam job Dickens had done to the Utilitarian ethos. As counter-narrative’s go, it has shoddy construction. It’s last popular airing was in the comic strip Little Orphan Annie.

(2) THE RANDY HIGHWAYMAN STRIKES AGAIN! Supposedly there were repeating characters in some Romantic era clapboard novels, specifically the more lewd ones. Prior to that, certain characters, such as Faust, had become public domain. A handful of these public domain characters were used in operas and plays created by different authors.

(3) SUPERMAN WAS STOLEN FROM HIS CREATORS. Sometimes the characters came in over the transom, as was sort of the case with Superman. In the case of The Shadow, the publisher had already publicized the character and then chanced into a writer with an idea which fit the concept. Most of the continuing characters were publisher ideas, but they were generally carried out by a lead writer.

(4) CRIME PAYS.  With a circulation of one million at its height, the comic book Crime Does Not Pay was the most successful True Crime publication ever. Beyond being a comic book, it’s only real twist on the form was the narrator.

(5) A  WORLD WITHOUT SUPERHEROES. It was more like a world without Dime Novels. An upgrade wave in children’s literature took place, wherein the Wizard of Oz and editions of Alice in Wonderland and their like started to appear at the spreading libraries. Free Public Libraries filled with shelves of better fare essentially killed the market for the impulse buy editions of Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter, which lived in Five and Dimes. That the flimsy and vulgar Dime Novels had been in reprint for decades had not helped their cause, either. There was one last Dime Novel hero boom--character magazines based on the exploits of college sports stars turned urban adventurers--of which Frank Merriwell (1896-1930) was the only notable character. Although he fought crime and was no doubt as amazing as the later Doc Savage, his time was split on other college centered activities. Like Nick Carter (and Chip Carter), Frank Merriwell made the transition to pulp before fading from view entirely.

(6) BATMAN IS A KLEPTOMANIAC. Batman isn’t even the first character to use the Bat motif. And having a kid sidekick was somewhat old hat too, borrowed from numerous cowboy type characters. The Batmobile was stolen from the Green Hornet. The cave headquarters and Bat Signal were lifted from the Phantom Detective.  Utility Belts were so old old hat that nearly every pulp vigilante carried some permutation of one—the Black Bat called his a utility belt. Only Batman’s origin story was somewhat unique. Pulp heroes usually were not motivated by childhood trauma.

(7) DIME NOVEL MUTATIONS. Dime Novels were seldom banned, but they were bad mouthed by generations of school teachers. Not only were some of their themes violent and less than puritan, but the grammar was often off. The core objection most school teachers had was in their spread of near vulgarities and slang. The format of Dime Novels also became co-opted by adult-leaning materials, such as Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang, Smokehouse and Breezy Stories.  

(8) ANTI-SOCIAL COMIC BOOK HEROES. Antiheroes have been something of a staple of comic books from the start. Most of them have been monsters, like the Heap, Swamp Thing or the Hulk. Others are Type A personalities who are heroic despite their flaws. Only Wonder Woman was actually advocating for a contrary moral code.

(9) FAIRY STORIES NOT FOR FAIRIES. That folklore tales are intended for children is a modern misinterpretation of the form. We can blame Walt Disney, but he wasn’t the first author to de-odorize these ancient tales. What some of the tales actually mean (or what they are meant to represent) can be unclear. The stories were retold because they were proven sellers, they entertained the crowd. Some of them were disguised propaganda and very few were intended to teach a moral lesson. 

(10) PULP MAGAZINES ARE FRAUDS. Dime Novels and Story Papers were printed on newsprint, an uncoated fairly thin paper stock. It ranges in quality from what you find crossword books and paperbacks printed on to the thin sheets used in low end bibles, dictionaries and phone directories. Prior to the Civil War this was the only sort of paper that periodicals were commonly fashioned from. Since most of this paper was used for printing newspapers, most early periodicals were newspaper-like. At the end of the Civil War it became possible to reproduce photographs on a special kind of coated stock. This led to the first boom in magazines. Most magazines were showcases for the mass reproduction of photography. That magazine form created an entirely new product category which became very popular with the public, so much so that it crowded out the space newsprint periodicals had once occupied. Forms which could attract advertising support soon made the transition to photo illustrated slick paper. Sort of. Most magazines which weren’t on a specific topic tried to do a bit of everything—news, fiction, photographs and illustrations. (Photographic reproduction was the most expensive part of the magazine, so it was usually padded out with text and other less expensive material.)  The Pulp Magazine was an economy mid point of the magazine form. It has a cover printed on slick magazine stock while its interior pages are on uncoated newsprint type stock. They are similar to today’s crossword puzzle magazines. This format came about as an evolution in attempts to dress up Dime Novels with slick covers as well as cost take outs in the slick magazine set up. Eventually the Pulp Magazine came to share the same dimensions and binding type as standard magazines. (Today only women’s fashion magazines and National Geographic still have this common box form outline. At one time all magazines were of these dimensions.) The Pulp Magazine format emerged early on, but did not become widespread until after Argosy (a former Story Paper for children) caught on. Thanks to Argosy’s success, the format became established as a vehicle for the packaging of fiction—both novels and anthologies of short stories. Later the Dell Publishing Company, itself a publisher of pulp fiction magazines, expanded the format to crossword puzzles. Pulp Magazines thrived in the era before the launch of the modern paperback.

(11) PULP MAGAZINES PROLIFERATED LIKE ZITS. And a few of them had the lifespan of a zit. Pulp magazines followed the overall trend in magazines. No matter how “General Interest” a typical slick magazine may have been, all of them had a targeted demographic in mind. Being an advertising driven market, magazines soon began subdividing into specific interests and topics, all designed to reach certain audiences. At first being an escapist fiction vehicle was a good enough specialization for Argosy. The dividing up of themes is similar to what we saw in the later medium of cable television. Also, Argosy was not hiding its success. It was coming out bi-weekly and had two sister publications also coming out bi-weekly. Other publishers soon jumped in, carving out various niches for Romance, then Adventure,  then Western and so on.

(12) TWO FLAVORS OF WEIRD MENACE DOOM. Weird Menace actually has two types of construction and a common theme for the heavy. The first type has the protagonist debunking what seems to be a supernatural event. Whether they do this deliberately, incidentally or by accident are where the real variations to this story type can be found. The second type involves mostly explainable events and at least one gruesome scene which is never debunked. By unraveling the explainable portions of the story the heroes are eventually led to the bad guy. (It all makes perfect sense, except for the part where the dragon bit Rachel in half and spit her bones at us.) In both forms, our bad guy is a thorough psychopath, someone who could have certainly accomplished his ends without resorting to gruesome stage illusions. Real estate speculation, of all things, is a common motive. It really is Scooby Do without the Mystery Bus gang.

(13) SPORTS FANS MAY NOT BE FICTION READERS. Initially the sports pulps were being churned out by publishers who were specifically in the fiction magazine business, with Street & Smith and Fiction House being mainstays. As time went on, however, the field was entered by firms which were in sports fandom first or who were operating scandal tabloids. Card Makers began to flood the sports fan segment, but never entered the sports fiction genre. In the end, just being in sports fictions was probably not enough to sustain the pulp publishers and they began to leave the field.

(14) WESTERNS RIDE OFF INTO THE SUNSET. The Western genre had started to fade in prominence in pulp magazine form, after being the dominant genre of the Dime Novels. Some historians (and publishers) have concluded that the increasing  urbanization of the readership had decreased interest in the genre as a whole.  This conclusion seems somewhat refuted by the Western's continued popularity in movies. And the genre essentially carried the later Digest field. The Digests were a form of proto-paperback (a format similar to the Archie Comics Digests seen at supermarket check outs) which originated with WWII and picked up steam in the era right before paperbacks became standardized. Mostly the Digest format carried the same material the Lending Library publishers had produced--half of it Sleaze and the rest of it split unevenly between Westerns and Detective Mystery. As a format for Detective Mystery, the digests were mostly a vehicle for condensed versions of proven material previously published in hardbound.  (Agatha Christie and Charlie Chan and the like.) Westerns reprinted their share of material (from pulps) but they also produced nearly as much original material as the Sleaze. I think the issue with the supposed early decline in Westerns had more to do with the format than the genre. From the 1920s onward, Pulp magazines were sold at urban newsstands. The Pulps never did crack into supermarkets and were late entries into the drug store distribution market. Digests, by contrast, were sold in less urban concentrated markets, such as gas stations and hardware stores and liquor stores. In short, like Country Western music, the Western genre did better outside of urban centers. That media in general has become more concentrated in urban-centric hands may have something to do with the decline of the genre as a whole.

(15) THE MOST ANONYMOUS  THIRTY MILLION PEOPLE EVER. At their height, pulp magazines had an audience of one third of the literate population of the United States. Even during their decline into counterculture from 1930 on, the industry touted a monthly circulation of 30 million. That said, at no time did any publisher bother to delve into what the demographics of this audience was. (If there is an excuse for this it is that the medium was not advertising supported.) The publishers did read their circulation figures fairly closely, however. Magazines with a positive ROI were allowed to continue, negative trenders were either slashed in frequency or cancelled.  

(16) MODERN ROMANCE VS. GOTHIC ROMANCE. Between the hard backs, the three all fiction slick magazines and all of the women’s magazines which ran fiction, probably about 60% of the audience was accounted for. To claim that there was some differentiation in the types of romance found in the pulps as opposed to the slicks is a bit of an overstatement. This material was all drawn from the same population of writers. Other than the True Confessions and the Flapper Fiction genres, the pulps and the other forms were producing very similar material. It's a guess that that the pulps skewed a bit younger and a bit more downmarket. There was certainly overlap in audience with all of the forms. The pulps dominated in word hole, producing seven times the amount of material as in the slicks alone. Whereas maybe 60% of the audience never strayed from the 10% of the genre produced in slick form, the rest of the readership was split up into the 90% of the material produced by the pulps.  As prolific as the Pulp houses were, the slick and hard back audience wasn’t entirely lost until the paperback became established as a form. It was the success of romance in paperback form that eventually spelled the death knell of the slick all fiction monthlies and the of fiction being presented in women’s magazines.

(17) REPRINTING KILLED THE PULPS. Pulp publishers recycled material, often without attributing it. The most common use of reprinted material happened between different forms—sticking something which had first appeared as a serial over several months in one magazine as the contents of a digest. They also moved the same material from one genre to the next, using a story which had originated in a Detective Mystery magazine in a Romance magazine or something from Romance in True Crime. More common was packaging features which had appeared in the back issues of one title as the new contents of another. The long-lived Yellow Book was always culled from material which had first been published in Breezy Stories or Young’s Magazine. This reprinting tactic picked up pace in the late 1940s through the end of the era. (Even the latest issues of True Story were reprints. In its last incarnation, all of Secrets Magazine was made up of reprints.) And when it came to producing the occasional one off porn magazine, the publishers had no qualms about re-presenting whatever they had on hand.

(18) REPORTED DEATH OF TRUE CONFESSIONS. Like the True Crimes magazines, True Story and all of the True Confessions magazines became the property of one single publisher. This publisher has since ceased operations, taking all of the titles dark with it. Supposedly they were purchased by another firm, but until I see them in t again in the flesh I am keeping them listed amongst the dead.