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Pulp is the Warmest Colour
An introduction by Maxim Jakubowski
1. Introduction: Better Dead than Read
Hardboiled writers, fear of a mass readership; finding the crime; locating guilt
2. A Knife that Cuts Both Ways
State paranoia and paranoid states in the fiction of David Goodis, Chester Himes and Jim Thompson
3. Taking Out Contracts
The origins of detection; the privatization of the investigatory process; the politics of Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Paul Pine and Mike Hammer; wages, conditions and inflationary tendencies of fictional private eyes
4. Femme Fatality
The portrayal of women in pulp culture fiction; women hardboiled writers; Leigh Brackett’s The Tiger Among Us, Dolores Hitchens’s Sleep with Strangers and Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place as tacit critiques of a male-oriented genre
5. Profits of Crime
The crime novel as social critique: William McGivern’s Odds Against Tomorrow and Death Runs Faster, Gil Brewer’s 13 French Street; Lionel White’s The Killing and The Big Caper
6. Beaten to a Pulp
The end of an era, reflected in Charles Williams’s The Big Bite and Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up and The Woman Chaser
Appendix I: Primary Pulp Culture Texts
Appendix II: From Pulp to Noir
About the Author
About the Publisher
Newsletter
Copyright
Back in 1966, I was living in France and my limited knowledge of crime fiction was restricted to Agatha Christie and Mickey Spillane. I had grown up a keen fan of science fiction and fantasy, attracted by its unlimited sense of wonder and my youthful self saw Christie as enjoyable if derivative, a perfect, uninvolving way of whiling away a few hours reading without overly engaging the brain whileas Spillane books (and others in its wake) offered a confused appeal due to their troubling promise of sex and matters sexual I could only guess at. It was then that Le Nouvel Observateur serialised Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 to celebrate the legendary Série Noire reaching its thousandth title. I had never heard of Jim Thompson before. Reading the excerpts I came to the conclusion that this was crime writing as I had never come across before, shockingly crude, realistic and disturbing, and it ticked a box in my imagination.
Less than two years later I was back in London without investigating the matter further as my priorities in life finally became to change and I became less of a bookworm and was awakened to certain realities involving the opposite sex and its splendours. When a decade or so later I entered the murky waters of book publishing, I was faced with a new set of realities and when in the early 1980s I was offered the opportunity to run my own publishing outfit, financed by the music industry, one of my first priorities was to explore genre fiction and return to my literary roots. However, after a quick survey, I came to the conclusion that the SF & fantasy field had, to my disappointment, been thoroughly mined (the idea had been to resurrect forgotten classics as my editorial budget precluded publishing new material). It was then that a spark lit up and I recalled Jim Thompson and following a bout of research discovered that, in France, he was just the tip of the iceberg. So many other names, all American, who were selling huge quantities of books in French to significant critical acclaim, and they all appeared to be long out of print in the UK and the USA, and in frequent cases, had never actually been published on our shores! I returned from a trip to Paris with a suitcase full of second hand books and plunged into a whole new world of words.
David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, Horace McCoy, William P. McGivern, Robert Finnegan, Charles Williams, Dolores Hitchens, Gil Brewer, and so many others opened my eyes to a whole new dimension of genre writing the Anglo-Saxon world had somehow managed to ignore. I was astounded. This was writing from the gut, writing that changed lives.
How could such a vital stream of American writing have come and gone and been largely ignored? It was as if I was opening a Pandora’s box of subversive delights, where every old / new writer I pulled out led me to yet another and in due course, would even reveal contemporary talents who had similarly been concealed in the metaphorical darkness like Marc Behm, Derek Raymond in the UK, Jerome Charyn and others.
I resolved to publish them all. Needless to say in many cases it became a gargantuan effort not only to obtain copies of the books in their original language but then to track down the rightful copyright holders through begging contract executives at publishing houses to scour their archives for my benefit, hunting down relatives and family survivors or even banks and long-retired literary agents and lawyers. To this date, no one has yet established who controls the rights to the wonderful Robert Finnegan late 1940s trio of stunning left-wing hardboiled novels and he remains unpublished as a result, which is a major loss to our appreciation of crime writing of that period.
The books began to appear to wonderfully complimentary reviews, albeit to only moderate sales. For a decade or so, it became my mission in publishing (aside from issuing countless cookery and gardening books, rock biographies, fitness and computer titles so that the companies I ran stayed afloat) to mine this seemingly inexhaustible vein of writing, from Black Box Thrillers onwards to the Blue Murder imprints. Quickly filmmakers beyond France began to take notice, younger English-language crime writers rediscovered the sources of their inspiration and, inevitably, American fans and editors jumped on the bandwagon when Barry Gifford adapted the idea to launch the Black Lizard list in the USA with most of the writers and titles I had previously uncovered to which he added a further batch of forgotten authors he had come across, as I had, in his youth. The iceberg of noir was being uncovered inch by inch and it was a veritable treasure trove.
Soon, major publishing houses inevitably began to lure the Estates away and giving some of the authors an even wider audience where we, smaller independents, could not. It felt as if a whole occult strand of literature, let alone crime writing, was being revealed. It was a great time.
A quarter century later, it is now self evident that Goodis and his cohorts were the true heirs of Chandler and Hammett, and it’s not just the wonderfully perverse pulpdar of French intellectuals who recognise the fact. A whole new generation of writers, within as well as outside the crime genre, has since been heavily influenced by the goldmine I and my fellow travellers in literary archeology brought to light and crime writing as we now know it has moved aeons beyond Agatha Christie and the universe of cosy.
It’s now fascinating to analyse the reasons, not so much for the sheer quality of these authors, why these writers were seldom appreciated in their lifetime and Woody Haut points us to the economic realities of the age of paperback publishing and the political and social context against which these books were written and their authors struggled to get their voices heard. His analysis is faultless and fascinating and his approach is both that of a fan, with enthusiasm bubbling under the surface, and an academic in its forensic attention to the facts, albeit without the cold detachment that academia sometimes brings to bear on a given subject.
Few critics have looked as closely at what I would proudly claim was an undeniable literary movement, disparate, scintillating, all-encompassing and beyond the sociological and literary detective work Haut has so successfully completed, what PULP CULTURE does is make us want to to read these books all over again as new fascinating facets are brought to light that make a new reading not only compelling but obligatory. And I say this as someone who had to read many of the books under consideration more than a dozen times each on average, through the reading process, the editorial stages, the proofreading and now see how much I missed!
Thank you Mr. Haut.
Maxim Jakubowski
December 2013
INTRODUCTION: BETTER DEAD THAN READ
Hardboiled writers; fear of a mass readership; finding the crime; locating the guilt
The Thin Man Takes the Stand
It is no coincidence that Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest was first published on the eve of the Wall Street Crash. Arguably the original hardboiled novel, Red Harvest was written in a period of active left-wing political dissent and remains the genre’s definitive statement regarding political corruption. Likewise, it is significant that Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me, Deadly, a blatant depiction of right-wing values, should have hit the newsstands in 1953, at the height of Cold War hysteria.
While in 1953 Spillane could only fantasize about ridding the world of communists, Hammett, in the context of the Cold War, had become politically suspect. Still struggling to complete his never-to-be-finished novel Tulip, Hammett would be called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s congressional sub-committee which was investigating charges that pro-communist books, including Hammett’s, had been found on the shelves of the State Department’s overseas libraries.
It was a year in which teenagers were dancing to Bill Haley’s Crazy, Man, Crazy and watching Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. The senator from Wisconsin fixed his eyes on his adversary, and said, ‘Mr Hammett, if you were spending, as we are, over a hundred million dollars a year on an information program allegedly for the purpose of fighting communism, and if you were in charge of that program to fight communism, would you allow your shelves to bear the work of some seventy-five communist authors, in effect placing our official stamp of approval upon those books?’
Hammett responded laconically. ‘Well, I think — of course, I don’t know — if I were fighting communism, I don’t think I would do it by giving people any books at all.’
McCarthy, realising that Hammett had just exposed his fear of a literate population, laughed uncomfortably. ‘From an author, that sounds unusual.’ With those words Hammett was excused. But it wouldn’t be long before he’d be paying for his irony and the implication that the availability and consumption of books are political issues. Shortly afterwards three hundred copies of Hammett’s books were removed from overseas libraries. Three years later the author who helped create a literary genre was sued by the government for back taxes, and eventually billed for $140,000. Financially ruined and suffering from inoperable lung cancer, Hammett died in 1961.
The year after Hammett had appeared before McCarthy, the National Security Council would, on five different occasions, discuss using atomic weapons against China. Society had become obsessed by the bomb; so much so that the means of retribution in Spillane’s ultra-violent Kiss Me, Deadly would be altered. In his screen adaptation, director Robert Aldrich updated Spillane’s signifier, changing it from a localized device capable of blasting Lilly, ‘a horrible caricature of a human’, off the face of the earth, to the more universally destructive ‘great atomic whatsit’.
Despite political differences, Hammett would have done well to note Mike Hammer’s comments in Kiss me, Deadly. ‘There’s no such thing as innocence’, says Hammer. ‘Innocence touched with guilt is as good a deal as you can get.’ Dashiell Hammett’s innocence had been waylaid somewhere between Los Alamos and the Ashland Federal Correctional Institution where he had served a six-month sentence in 1951 for refusing to answer questions in a case involving eleven indicted communist leaders facing deportation under the Smith Act. Moreover, Hammett was un-innocent enough to know that books are, in themselves, investigations, and, if one seeks mass distribution and a mass readership, one acknowledges the dominant cultural narrative or suffers the consequences.
In Pursuit of the Marginal
The meeting between Hammett and McCarthy is crucial to the development of pulp culture, for it highlights on the one hand the political potential of hardboiled writing and, on the other, the creation of a mass readership. Though by the end of the Second World War Hammett’s literary output had ground to a halt, his work would remain an important influence on subsequent hardboiled fiction. Between 1945 and 1960 numerous hardboiled novels were published, many of which successfully captured the paranoia and urban reality of the Cold War years.
Still considered low-brow and throwaway, hardboiled writing has remained marginal in its relationship to mainstream literary criticism. Given the tediousness of mainstream literary criticism, there may be little reason to regret this. At the same time, it indicates a class-based separation between writers who have the status of literary artists and those who have been relegated to the status of literary workers. Tied to contracts and deadlines and obliged to include obligatory scenes of sex and violence, these writers, many of them refugees from other professions, were subject to the vagaries of the market.
Not surprisingly, literary workers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Geoffrey Homes, Charles Williams, Dolores Hitchens, Leigh Brackett, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Horace McCoy continue to be omitted from mainstream or post-modern literary criticism. Regardless of subjective notions concerning what constitutes ‘good’ writing or the tenuous relationship that exists between popular literature and literary criticism, hardboiled writing has been marginalized precisely because it is a class-based literature. Yet this marginalization has, in turn, provided hardboiled writing a perspective from which to continue its reflection and critique of society.
Pulp to Pocket
‘OUT TODAY — THE NEW POCKET BOOK THAT MAY REVOLUTIONIZE AMERICA’S READING HABITS’
(from a 1939 Pocket Book advertisement)
‘BOOKS ARE WEAPONS — in a free democracy everyone may read what he likes. Books educate, inform, inspire; they also provide entertainment, bolster morale... Read them and pass them on’
(from a Dell wartime advertisement)
The genre of pulp fiction has become synonymous with cheap paperbacks whose gaudy covers invariably portray men with guns and women with low necklines. Strictly speaking, the genre consists of stories written for pulp magazines published, for the most part, prior to the Second World War. In fact, the heyday of pulp magazines would last only until the introduction of pocket (paperback) books. Thus pulp fiction, when used to describe post-war crime writing, is a slightly misleading, though useful, term.
Paperback fiction began tamely enough. Amongst Pocket Book’s first ten titles were such steamy writers as Agatha Christie, James Hilton (Goodbye Mr Chips) and Dorothea Brande. The war, with its captive market, would take the production and consumption of cheap paperbacks into a higher gear, forcing publishers to cultivate, and respond to, a mass readership. Since paperbacks had yet to reach their popular peak, many hardboiled writers, having contributed to pulp magazines like Black Mask, were first published in hardback. This was the case with two of the era’s most adept writers, Jim Thompson and David Goodis. Though between them they published some twenty-five paperback novels during the 1950s, their outstanding early work, including Thompson’s 1949 Nothing More Than Murder and Goodis’s 1946 Dark Passage, initially appeared in hardcover editions.
By 1949, nine companies had ventured into the paperback market. In 1951, production hit a peak, when 886 titles were published, eight times the number that appeared in 1945. Yet this increase coincided with a slump in sales — the influence of television perhaps causing a miscalculation of the market — prompting publishers to opt for more lurid formats. This, in turn, would lead to attacks by anti-pornography campaigners. According to one US senator, ‘alien-minded radicals and moral perverts’ had infiltrated the pocket-book market, while, in 1952, the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials concluded: ‘Some of the most offensive infractions of the moral code were found to be contained in low-cost, paper-bound publications known as ‘pocket-size books’... which... have... degenerated into media for the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy.’ Since pocket books also published the likes of Theodore Dreiser, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Jean-Paul Sartre, pocket books were being judged not merely by their covers. For these accusations, like those voiced by Joseph McCarthy, could have been prompted by the fact that ordinary people were reading books once thought the province of an educated middle class; or the fear that, with the advent of the paperback original, these same people were about to create their own literary genre.
Though Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Latimer were published in paperback before 1945, it wouldn’t be until after the Second World War that hardboiled writing became associated with the paperback industry. Many readers, demanding more than mere ‘whodunnits’ preferred fiction that portrayed the reality of post-war urban life. As attacks on paperbacks grew, the number of mysteries actually fell from 50 per cent of the market in 1945 to 26 per cent in 1950 and 13 per cent in 1955. Having become something of a cliché, traditional mysteries would be replaced by crime and low-life fiction — particularly that which emphasized violence, sex and paranoia. Culturally more interesting and varied than mysteries, this new form of hardboiled paperback published by companies like Gold Medal, Ace, Signet and Dell would not only portray US society as inherently criminal but would also reflect the woof and warp of the Cold War at a time when America’s yellow-brick road had turned into a mean and ultimately dead-end street.
Consequently, the term pulp culture denotes an era dominated by the excesses of disposability, and marks the relationship between pulp fiction and a historical period that begins with the 6 August 1945 bombing of Japan. This was an event closely followed by the publication of such pulp culture classics as The Big Clock (Fearing), Dark Passage (Goodis), Nightmare Alley (Gresham), Build My Gallows High (Homes), Ride The Pink Horse (Hughes), Seven Slayers (Cain), If He Hollers Let Him Go (Himes) and Heed The Thunder (Thompson). The era culminates sometime between 1960 and 1963, with the election and eventual assassination of John F. Kennedy, accompanied by the publication of books indicating a nation in transition — The Heat’s On (Himes), The Hustler (Tevis), The Woman Chaser (Willeford). With reality appearing to overtake fiction, hardboiled writing would soon turn, for the most part, into pastiche and parody. Meanwhile, a macabre connection might be made between the pulping of books, the pulping of a nation and the pulping of a president.
Morbid Symptoms
Best remembered as the author of The Big Clock, Kenneth Fearing was, like Dorothy B. Hughes, a poet and writer of crime fiction. In this dual position, Fearing was able to examine the relationship between crime, narrative, language and culture, noting, in his poem Sherlock Spends a Day in the Country, ‘The crime, if there was a crime, has not been reported as yet; / The plot, if that is what it was, is still a secret somewhere in this / wilderness of newly fallen snow.’
The essential investigation, according to Fearing, is to locate the crime and find the plot — a political act that entails the writer taking into account the prevailing conditions of an era. Regarding the effect of the mass media on crime writing and culture, Fearing says, ‘The revolution that calls itself The Investigation had its rise in the theaters of communication, and now regularly parades its images across them, reiterates its gospel from them, daily and hourly marches through the corridors of every office, flies into the living room of every home.’ Thus the mass media helped create a narrative context for pulp culture writing, as it too focused on individual rather than state crimes.
With the old world dying and the new one about to abort, the morbid symptoms suggested by pulp culture were becoming apparent. Their impact and effect soon placed a topical spin on Horace McCoy’s description of the historical process in No Pockets in a Shroud: ‘A man goes to bed tonight a fool and tomorrow morning he wakes up a wise man. He can’t explain what’s happened in between; all he knows is its happened.’ Indicative of the era, and hardboiled fiction’s uneasy transition from pre-war to post-war hardboiled fiction, McCoy’s No Pockets in a Shroud would, in 1948, be altered by a New American Library editor who, fearing a Marxist interpretation, found it necessary to change the heroine from a communist to a sex pervert.
Meanwhile, the Marshall Plan, the establishment of the CIA, the federal loyalty program, the Taft-Hartley Act (depoliticizing the CIO), the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and military intervention in Guatemala, Lebanon and Korea contributed to the era’s paranoia. This condition would be epitomized by Mike Hammer who, in One Lonely Night, declares, ‘I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it... They were Commies... red sons of bitches who should have died long ago.’
Despite a period of industrial unrest, a war-rejuvenated economy juiced productivity to an unprecedented level. The result was an expanded middle class and an increase in suburban dwellings (between 1950 and 1960 suburbs grew forty times faster than central areas). Yet, as portrayed in many pulp culture novels, there remained a considerable amount of economic and social disparity. For those able to do so, relocating to the suburbs was a means of ignoring, or at least escaping, this disparity. As the nuclear family — a portentous term considering how social conditions would shatter many dreams of suburban Utopia — replaced the extended family, the values underpinning suburban life were prefigured in post-war advertisements in which women were told, ‘You’re living for this minute... the day your man comes home for keeps. You want a house... a garden. All the happy dreams you laid away in rose leaves come bubbling back to life.’ Or shown to be saying, ‘He’s coming home — and I’m throwing away the book.’ These dreams and values existed alongside pulp culture texts which viewed this social shift with unease. In William McGivern’s brilliant portrayal of suburban versus urban angst, The Big Heat, the mob blows apart Detective Bannion’s cosy middle-class home not long after ‘dick’ and soon-to-be-deceased wife discuss child development over gin and tonics. Here suburbia must not only be defended, but urbanism, with its incipient problems, must be attacked.
Against the background of an expanding middle class and encroaching consumerism, pulp culture writing, with notable exceptions (Dorothy B. Hughes, Dolores Hitchens, Leigh Brackett, Vera Caspary, Mildred Davis, Margaret Millar), represents male fantasies in which the suburbs are a last refuge. In these texts, invariably written from a male perspective, women with children are kept in the background and only occasionally allowed to intrude into the narrative. More often than not, it is the femme fatale, often an urban throwaway or product of a wealthy family, who must carry the narrative to its doom-ridden conclusion.
Whatever their political orientation, the subtexts of hardboiled fiction reveal as much about the culture as the author. In the best, though bleakest, hardboilers — those of Thompson, Goodis, McCoy — characters, faced with cultural apprehensions regarding the ‘Red Menace’ and nuclear devastation, commit, with minimal moral intrusion from the author, any number of antisocial acts for seemingly inexplicable reasons. The implication is that protagonists know others better than they know themselves. In Many A Monster, published in 1949 and an early example of what would become a post-modern crime cliché — a novel about a serial killer — Robert Finnegan writes, ‘Although he could no longer understand himself, he still understood other people.’ While Thompson, in The Killer Inside Me, writes, ‘We might have the disease... or we might just be cold blooded and smart as hell; or we might be innocent of what we’re supposed to have done.’ For both writers — Finnegan a former radical trade unionist and Thompson a former communist — human behaviour, warped by conditions and circumstances, can be extreme and unpredictable. Neither, however, offers a coherent cure for society’s ills. Yet this, and the narrative objectivity of many hardboiled writers, might have had more to do with avoiding the wrath of McCarthyism than believing that political explanations had become irrelevant. While pulp culture fiction contains few overt political statements, its subject matter — capitalism’s relationship to crime, corruption, desire and power — remains highly political.
In either case, these critiques, or their absence, found favour with the reading public. Cassidy’s Girl by David Goodis, published in 1951 by Gold Medal, sold over a million copies. Such novels attracted the attention of Hollywood movie studios, already feeling the pressure of McCarthyism. With a number of pulp culture writers working as scriptwriters, it was often easier to insinuate that all was not perfect in America through the ambiguities of film noir rather than confront the system and risk having one’s message co-opted.
Nevertheless, while propaganda, the staple of much proletariat writing, was not a primary feature of hardboiled crime or low-life investigation, many pulp culture writers had been influenced by their proletariat predecessors (London, Kromer, Anderson, Conroy), especially when portraying those characters marginal to the dominant culture. Pulp culture writers were not only familiar with magazines like Black Mask, but they were within a tradition whose writing, according to David Madden, is ‘as terse and idiomatic as the news headlines and people who speak the language of the streets, the pool rooms, the union halls, the bull pens, the factories, the hobo jungles...’. Consequently, pulp culture writing retained the basic themes of proletariat writing: the corrosive power of money, class antagonism, capitalism’s ability to erode the community, turning its citizens into a disparate band of self-centred and alienated individuals — the only difference being that this was an era in which paranoia and suspicion had become public commodities. This was summed up nicely by Robert Finnegan in Many A Monster, when the book’s narrator comments drolly, ‘The presence of a lunatic in the restaurant gave her a sense of personal insecurity’. Chandler, centring on inter-personal relationships, takes an equal-sized bite from the culture, saying, ‘We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen’.
Pulp culture writers would respond to the era in different ways. But few were openly political. While it was hardly necessary for Mickey Spillane to be ambiguous, William McGivern’s work, particularly The Big Heat, can be read as an attack on organized crime or as a veiled critique of McCarthyism. On the other hand David Goodis, known for reading The Daily Worker for its jazz listings rather than its line on current events, would, after retreating to his native Philadelphia and family, write numerous pulp culture classics that exuded alienation and paranoia. Likewise Chester Himes who, weary of America’s racism and having offended everyone — communists, New Dealers, Jews and bourgeois blacks — in If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, would move to Europe where he would write the famous Harlem detective novels which are eloquent statements regarding urban black culture between the wars.
It was left to a prairie populist like Jim Thompson to portray the disfigurements of capitalism, identifying it as a national, rather than local, disease. In the last section of his 1958 novel The Getaway, capitalism is represented by the kingdom of El Rey — a dystopia with a ‘climate to suit every taste’ and the ‘largest per capita police force in the world’ — a place to which thieves and capitalists escape, but from which there is no escape; where cannibalism is an everyday and logical act: ‘A smell filled the air. The odor of peppery, roasting flesh... ‘Quite fitting, eh señor? And such an easy transition. One need only live literally as he has always done figuratively.’ Here paranoia is essential for survival:
Most immigrants travel to the kingdom in pairs. In the beginning, each will handle his own money, carefully contributing an exact half of the common expenses. But this is awkward, it leads to arguments, and no matter how much the individual has he is never quite free of the specter of want. So very soon there is a casual discussion of the advantages of a joint account, and it is casually agreed that they should open one. And from then on — well, the outcome depends on which of the two is the shrewder, the more cold-blooded or requires the least sleep.
But the kingdom of El Rey is also a post-pulp culture world where the extremes of capitalism destroy anything human. Whichever, the male protagonists of these narratives are frequently seduced by the kingdom’s promise of wealth. Inarticulate, avaricious, subversive or paranoid, they attempt to claw their way into the kingdom only to be pulped along the way. The process of their destruction is a primary subtext in pulp culture fiction.
Losing the Narrative
Currently repackaged out of a sense of nostalgia and a need to profit from the past, it’s not surprising that original pulp culture paperbacks have become consumer objects fetching extraordinary prices. At the same time, pulp culture reprints are avidly consumed, allowing fin de siécle readers both to investigate the past and, in noting the literature’s language, place, attitudes and politics, make connections with the present. This, in turn, has helped create a new generation of crime writers — James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, James Crumley, Sara Paretsky and Elmore Leonard, for example — who have gone beyond parody to examine the new urban reality in which they find themselves.
With its fellow travellers, informers, infiltrators and misogynists, the 1950s was an era of psychotic behaviour and suicidal impulse, of shadows, square jaws and dangerous women. Whether liberal (McGivern), radical (Himes), populist (Thompson), nihilist (Goodis) or fascist (Spillane), pulp culture writers produced a class-based popular literature, which, with its compelling tales of corruption, violence and obsessive behaviour, indicated a nation struggling with itself.
Limited by format but sharing a mood, style and historic juncture, pulp culture plots were inevitably secondary to the obsessional world they created. Likewise the set pieces and solutions to crimes — for so long a part of the detective novel tradition — grew less important than the perceptions gathered along the way. As the present-day reader becomes entrapped in that process the crimes mount, and are eventually lost within the fabric of an imagined society. It’s here that pulp culture stories begin to merge and the genre takes the shape of a single narrative, and it is through this narrative that a contemporary reconstruction of the pulp culture era is possible.
Pulp Culture examines this narrative while focusing on the era’s most interesting and energetic writers and texts. Though the chapters explore relevant themes they vary in approach, moving from a survey of the genre and its two basic components — paranoia and private detection — to placing specific texts in political and historical contexts. The first chapter delves into the dark and paranoid worlds of David Goodis, Chester Himes and Jim Thompson, situating their bleak and violent narratives in the social and political framework of their time. The second chapter investigates the politics of private investigators: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Howard Browne’s Paul Pine, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. It goes on playfully to explore the effect of inflation on the rates of fictional private detection. The third chapter discusses the portrayal of women in pulp culture fiction through Leigh Brackett’s The Tiger Among Us, Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place and Dolores Hitchens’s Sleep With Strangers. Not only are these books indicative of the era, they also illustrate how female pulp culture writers were able to negotiate their way through a male-oriented genre. The fourth chapter examines the crime novel as social critique, exemplified by William McGivern’s Odds Against Tomorrow and Death Runs Faster, Gil Brewer’s 13 French Street and Lionel White’s The Killing and The Big Caper. The final chapter considers the final days of the Cold War era as portrayed in Charles Williams’s The Big Bite and Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up and The Woman Chaser. With fiction unable to stand comparison to the era’s events and policies, these novels illustrate the destruction of pulp culture protagonists and the texts in which they appear. Lastly, with pulp culture fiction and film noir inextricably linked, the book concludes with a filmography, listing the contributions of relevant writers and a selection of twenty films based on pulp culture narratives.