Pulp Crime Read online

  Ice from a Corpse (Ed Barcelo), Crime Fiction Stories, December 1950

  The Ice Man Came (William Hopson), Thrilling Detective, Winter 1953

  Identity Unknown (Jonathan Craig), Manhunt, June 1954

  It’s Great to Be Great! (Thomas Thursday), Top-Notch Magazine, July 15, 1925

  It’s Time to Go Home (William G. Bogart), Mammoth Mystery, March 1946

  Kidnapped Evidence (Joseph J. Millard), Thrilling Mystery, March 1942

  Kill One, Kill Two (B.J. Benson), Thrilling Detective, February 1951

  The Killer (John D. MacDonald), Manhunt, January 1955

  Killer at Large (Edward Ronns), Detective Fiction Weekly, November 9, 1940

  The Killer Came Home (Robert C. Dennis), Detective Tales, December 1943

  The Killer Type (William Decatur), Private Detective Stories, October 1942

  The Killer’s Shoes (Robert C. Blackmon), Thrilling Detective, December 1948

  Killer’s Lunch Hour (Lloyd Llewell), Exciting Detective, Fall, August 1940

  Killers Must Advertise (H.H. Stinson), Ten Detective Aces, May 1937

  Knife in the Dark (Robert Leslie Bellem), G-Men Detective, January 1949

  Lady in Red (Alan Ritner Anderson), Detective Tales, May 1950

  The Lady in the Case (Lee E. Wells), Crack Detective, March 1943

  Last Chance Acre (Maitland Scott), Ten Detective Aces, March 1937

  Little Man, You’ll Have a Bloody Day (Russell Branch), Dime Mystery Magazine, December 1947

  Little Old Lady (Owen Fox Jerome), Detective Novels, February 1944

  Little Pieces (C.S. Montanye), Exciting Detective, March 1943

  Live Bait (E. Hoffmann Price), Alibi, April 1934

  Look Death in the Eye! (Lawrence Block), Saturn Web Detective Story Magazine, April 1959

  The Long Night (Philip Ketchum), Thrilling Detective, June 1952

  Lust Song (Stuart Friedman), Manhunt, December 1956

  Mad About Murder (Scott O’Hara), Dime Detective Magazine, September 1949

  Mail Me My Tombstone (Charles Larson), Ten Detective Aces, April 1943

  Make-Up for Murder (Thomas King), Spicy Detective Stories, November 1935

  Man From the Wrong Time-Track (Denis Plimmer), Uncanny Stories, April 1941

  Manuscript of Murder (Peter Warren), Thrilling Detective, April 1950

  May Come In? (Fletcher Flora), Suspense, February 1957

  Memo for Murder (Leo Stalnaker), Secret Agent “X”, December 1938

  Memphis Blues (Frank Johnson), Thrilling Detective, September 1944

  The Mental Bloodhound (Helmar Lewis), Mammoth Detective, March 1943

  Merry Christmas, Copper! (Johnston McCulley), G-Men Detective, Winter 1946, December 1945

  Miracle on 9th Street (Day Keene), Thrilling Detective, April 1952

  The Miracle Man (Eric Howard), Detective Fiction Weekly, March 19, 1938

  Miss Dynamite (Peter Dawson), Ten Detective Aces, August 1941

  Moonlight Saving (E.O. Umsted), Exciting Detective, Fall, August 1940

  Morgue Reunion (Norman A. Daniels), 10-Story Detective, November 1946

  Mortgage on Murder (Benton Braden), Thrilling Detective, December 1942

  Murder After the Fact (E.C. Marshall), Ten Detective Aces, September 1945

  Murder and the Southwind (Mary Roberts Rinehart), The Frightened Wife: And Other Murder Stories, 1963

  Murder Breeder (Mark Harper), Clues Detective Stories, June 1940

  Murder by Installment (Eric Preston), Detective Short Stories, November 1941

  Murder Comes Calling (Logan Legare), Crime Fiction Stories, December 1950

  Murder Comes Home (D.L. Champion), Thrilling Detective, February 1951

  Murder for Nothing (Jeremy Lane), Ten Detective Aces, May 1937

  Murder Hunch (John Benton), Thrilling Detective, August 1951

  Murder in Small Packages (William Rough), Ten Detective Aces, November 1945

  Murder Muddle (James Howard Leveque), Ten Detective Aces, February 1938

  Murder Off the Record (Bill Morgan), Ten Detective Aces, January 1946

  Murder on Beat (Joseph H. Hernandez), Thrilling Detective, July 1940

  Murder on Santa Claus Lane (William G. Bogart), G-Men Detective, January 1943

  Murder on the Limited (Howard Finney), Detective-Dragnet Magazine, September 1932

  Murder on the Menu (Michael O’Brien), Popular Detective, June 1944

  Murder Rides Behind the Siren (Prescott Chaplin), Black Book Detective, Summer 1944

  Murder Rides High (Leonard Finley Hilts), Mammoth Detective, September 1946

  Murder Trail (Anthony Tompkins), G-Men Detective, May 1947

  Murder with Onions (Philip Weck), Popular Detective, January 1952

  Murder’s Handyman (Woodrow Wilson Smith), Popular Detective, March 1948

  Murderer’s Bait (Jerome Severs Perry), Spicy Detective Stories, September 1936

  Necktie Party (Robert Turner), Manhunt, August 1954

  Never Trust a Cop (W.T. Ballard), Captain Satan, May 1938

  Nice Bunch of Guys (Michael Fessier), Manhunt, May 1953

  Nicely Framed, Ready to Hang! (Daniel Gordon), Detective Tales, February 1952

  The Night Before Murder (Steve Fisher), Triple Detective, Spring 1948

  Night of the Thirteenth (J.A. Allan)

  Night Scene (Jerome Severs Perry), Spicy Detective Stories, May 1935

  No Lease on Life (Allan K. Echols), G-Men Detective, January 1948

  Now I Lay Me Down to Die (Anthony Tompkins), G-Men Detective, February 1946

  O’Sheen’s Photo Finish (Leon Yerxa), Mammoth Detective, August 1943

  Objective—Murder! (William R. Cox), Dime Detective Magazine, March 1946

  Odds Are on Death (Ashley Calhoun), Crime Fiction Stories, December 1950

  Off the Record (Robert Wallace), Thrilling Detective, January 1942

  On a Sunday Afternoon (Gil Brewer), Manhunt, January 1957

  Once There Was a Wolf (Bert Collier), Detective Tales, October 1944

  One Dumb Cop (Richard Brister), Smashing Detective Stories, December 1953

  One Escort—Missing or Dead (Roger Torrey), Lone Wolf Detective Magazine, April 1941

  One Hunch to Hell (Richard A. Virgil)

  One Hundred Bucks Per Stiff (J. Lloyd Conrich), Hooded Detective, January 1942

  One Man’s Poison (Curt Hamlin), Dime Mystery Magazine, August 1949

  One More Murder (G.T. Fleming-Roberts), Five Novels Monthly, March 1942

  Only Human (H.G. Merz), Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, March 1940

  Paid in Blood (Anthony Clemens), Secret Agent “X”, April 1934

  Parting Gift (Frank Ward), Crime Fiction Stories, December 1950

  The Phantom Witness (Clark Frost), Ten Detective Aces, February 1941

  The Pickpocket (Mickey Spillane), Manhunt, December 25, 1954

  The Pin-up Girl Murders (Laurence Donovon), Super-Detective, April 1944

  Please, I Killed Him (Wayland Rice), Thrilling Detective, July 1946

  The Plunge (David Goodis), Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October 1958

  Points South (Flora Fletcher), Manhunt, June 1954

  Pop Goes the Queen (Bob Wade and Bill Miller), Triple Detective, Fall 1948

  Puppet Boss of Destiny (Ernest Bean), Ten Detective Aces, March 1938

  The Purple Collar (Jonathan Craig), Manhunt, December 25, 1954

  Race With Death (Marian Gailor Squire), Ten Detective Aces, May 1937

  Red Blood and Green Soap (Dale Clark), Mammoth Detective, March 1943

  The Red Tide (Cornell Woolrich), Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, September 1940

  The Road to Carmichael’s (Richard Wormser), The Saturday Evening Post, September 19, 1942

  Rock-a-Bye Booby (Richard Brister), Ten Detective Aces, September 1943

  Rx to Homicide (John A. Saxon), Crack Detective Stories, November 1944

  Satan’s
Boneyard (Leon Dupont), 12 Adventure Stories, October 1939

  Save a Grave for Me! (Dane Gregory), Detective Tales, October 1944

  Scarecrows Don’t Bleed (Joe Archibald), Exciting Detective, Fall September 1942

  Seasoned Crime (Donald Bayne Hobart), Popular Detective, August 1941

  The Secondhand Murders (Ben Conlon), Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, March 1940

  She Waits in Hell (Paul Ernst), Detective Tales, February 1937

  She’ll Make a Gorgeous Corpse (Eric Provost), Ten Detective Aces, January 1943

  Shield for Murder (William P. McGivern), The Blue Book Magazine, February 1951

  Shoot Fast, But Shoot Straight! (Sam Carson), Thrilling Detective, December 1946

  The Silent Witness (H. Frederic Young), Ten Detective Aces, April 1941

  The Sinister Curtain (Kenneth Keith), Secret Agent “X”, September 1938

  Slayer’s Keepers (T.W. Ford), Crack Detective, September 1945

  Slender Clue (E.D. Gardner), Stirring Detective & Western Stories, February 1941

  Somebody’s Going to Die (Talmage Powell), Manhunt, January 1957

  Squealer (John D. MacDonald), Manhunt, May 1956

  Stakeout (Don De Boe), Famous Detective Stories, February 1955

  Stand-In For Slaughter (Grover Brinkman), Mobsters, December 1952

  Step Down to Terror (John McPartland), Argosy, November 1954

  Still of Night (Will Oursler), Popular Detective, July 1948

  Stranger in the House (Theodore Pratt), Manhunt, January 1957

  Sue as in Suicide (C.S. Montanye), Thrilling Detective, October 1949

  The Suicide Coterie (Emile C. Teppermen), Secret Agent “X”, March 1938

  Suicide Hook-Up (Albert G. Robinson), Ten Detective Aces, August 1941

  Suicide Souvenir (Dennis Layton), 10-Story Detective, January 1941

  Swamp Search (Harry Whittington), Murder, July 1957

  Sweet Dreams, Darling (Paul W. Fairman), Mammoth Detective, July 1947

  “Sweet Sue” (Bill Williams), 10 Story Book, July 1934

  The Swindler’s Wife (Robert Standish), The Saturday Evening Post, December 13, 1958

  “Take ’Im Alive” (Walter C. Scott), The Underworld Magazine, May 1933

  Tea Party Frame-Up (Robert Martin), Mammoth Detective, May 1944

  Then Live to Use It (Greta Bardet), Crack Detective, January 1943

  These Shoes are Killing Me (Leon Yerxa), Mammoth Detective, May 1943

  They Gave Him a Badge! (John Corbett), Detective Tales, January 1946

  Through the Wall (G.T. Fleming-Roberts), Mammoth Detective, September 1942

  Time to Kill (Leo Hoban), Crack Detective, January 1945

  To Hell With Death (Cyril Plunkett), Detective Novels, December 1940

  Too Many Angles (Calvin L. Boswell), Popular Detective, June 1942

  Too Old to Die (Jack Gleoman), Thrilling Detective, October 1949

  Too Tough (John Graham), Black Mask, August 1940

  Top It Off With Death (Basil Wells), Ten Detective Aces, June 1946

  The Touch of Death (Norman A. Daniels), Thrilling Detective, February 1951

  Tracks in the Snow (Samuel Mines), Thrilling Detective, July 1945

  Trap the Man Down (Harold Gluck), 10-Story Detective, August 1949

  The Triangular Blade (Carter Sprague), Thrilling Detective, October 1946

  Trigger Men (Eustace Cockrell), Blue Book, October 1936

  Twenty Grand Leg (Walter Wilson), Thrilling Detective, February 1945

  Two for a Corpse (Lawrence Treat), Detective Fiction Weekly, July 20, 1940

  The Two O’Clock Blonde (James M. Cain), Manhunt, August 1953

  Undercover Checkmate (Steve Fisher), Secret Agent “X”, February 1937

  Voice of the Dead (Ted Stratton), Detective Tales, October 1944

  Wake Up and Die! (Robert Turner), 10-Story Detective, October 1947

  Wanted By the D.A. (Avin H. Johnston), Popular Detective, August 1937

  Welcome for Killers (John P. Rees), Ten Detective Aces, October 1940

  White Heat (Arthur J. Burks), Detective Novels (Canada), June 1943

  The Will (Richard B. Sale), Popular Detective, September 1935

  Will for a Kill (Emil Petaja), 10-Story Detective, November 1946

  Wrong Number (John L. Benton), Thrilling Detective, February 1948

  The Yellow Curse (Lars Anderson), Thrilling Mystery, April 1936

  You Built a Frame for Me (Leonard B. Rosborough), Detective Short Stories, November 1941

  You Can’t Mince Homicide (Robert S. Fenton), Ten Detective Aces, March 1938

  You Never Can Tell (Jack Kofoed), Thrilling Detective, June 1948

  You’ll Die Laughing (William L. Hamling), Mammoth Detective, July 1946

  You’ll Kill the People (Richard Brister), Smashing Detective Stories, September 1951

  THE PULPS: A Short History

  Pulp magazines (often referred to as “the pulps”), also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long. Pulps were printed on cheap paper with ragged, untrimmed edges.

  The name pulp comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper were called “glossies” or “slicks.” In their first decades, they were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks were 25 cents apiece. Pulps were the successor to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of “hero pulps”; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom Detective.

  The first “pulp” was Frank Munsey’s revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896, about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue on pulp paper with untrimmed edges and no illustrations, not even on the cover. While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people. In six years Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million.

  Street & Smith were next on the market. A dime novel and boys’ weekly publisher, they saw Argosy’s success, and in 1903 launched The Popular Magazine, billed as the “biggest magazine in the world” by virtue of being two pages longer than Argosy. Due to differences in page layout, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy. The Popular Magazine introduced color covers to pulp publishing. The magazine began to take off when, in 1905, the publishers acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha, by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his popular novel She. Haggard’s Lost World genre influenced several key pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt. In 1907, the cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue; along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine, this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of Argosy. Street and Smith’s next innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, each magazine focusing on a genre such as detective stories, romance, etc.

  At their peak of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, the most successful pulps could sell up to one million copies per issue. The most successful pulp magazines were Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book and Short Stories described by some pulp historians as “The Big Four”. Among the best-known other titles of this period were Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Love Story Magazine, Marvel Tales, Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown, Weird Tales and Western
Story Magazine. Although pulp magazines were primarily a US phenomenon, there were also a number of British pulp magazines published between the Edwardian era and World War Two. Notable UK pulps included Pall Mall Magazine, The Novel Magazine, Cassell’s Magazine, The Story-Teller, and Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story. The German fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten had a similar format to American pulp magazines, in that it was printed on rough pulp paper and heavily illustrated.

  The Second World War paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production, starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps. Beginning with Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1941, pulp magazines began to switch to digest size; smaller, thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks. The pulp format declined from rising expenses, but even more due to the heavy competition from comic books, television, and the paperback novel. In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s, Men’s adventure magazines began to replace the pulp.

  The 1957 liquidation of the American News Company, then the primary distributor of pulp magazines, has sometimes been taken as marking the end of the “pulp era”; by that date, many of the famous pulps of the previous generation were defunct. Almost all of the few remaining pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines now in formats similar to “digest size”, such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The format is still in use for some lengthy serials, like the German science fiction weekly Perry Rhodan.

  Over the course of their evolution, there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles; Harry Steeger of Popular Publications claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month. Many titles of course survived only briefly. While the most popular titles were monthly, many were bimonthly and some were quarterly. The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories. Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, writers attempting to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces.

  Pulp covers were printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper. They were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines. The early pulp magazines could boast covers by some distinguished American artists; The Popular Magazine had covers by N.C. Wyeth, and Edgar Franklin Wittmack contributed cover art to Argosy and Short Stories. Later, many artists specialized in creating covers mainly for the pulps; a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages. Among the most famous pulp artists were Walter Baumhofer, Earle K. Bergey, Margaret Brundage, Edd Cartier, Virgil Finlay, Earl Mayan, Frank R. Paul, Norman Saunders, Nick Eggenhofer, (who specialized in Western illustrations), Rudolph Belarski and Sidney Riesenberg. Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.