Adventure House Guide to the Pulps

by John Locke, Douglas Ellis

Penzler Pick, November 2000: I'm a sucker for good reference books about mystery fiction and this one is pretty good, if extremely limited to those who remember the great era of pulp magazines and collect them. Pulps (in case you are really young and don't know about them) were very inexpensive magazines that flourished during the period shortly before WWI to just after WWII. They were filled with fiction produced at a prodigious pace by writers who worked for a penny a word--or two cents if they established a reputation and a following. Beginning with general interest pulps, such as All-Story and Popular, the enormous success of these inexpensive treasure troves of fiction quickly brought spinoffs that were more narrowly focused. Fans of romance fiction could go to the newsstand for a copy of Love Adventures, Love Book Magazine,Love Fiction Monthly, Love Romances, Love Story Magazine, Love Short Stories, and dozens of others. Readers who wanted westerns had the same huge range, as did those who preferred science fiction, fantasy, sports, railroads, jungle stories, and so on.

But the most popular fiction of all was the mystery, and there were hundreds of specialty magazines that catered to that taste. Black Mask was the most famous, serving as the springboard for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among many others, but equally popular were Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective, not to mention the great "hero" pulp, The Shadow. There was a lot of junk between the covers of many of these magazines, but a lot of great stuff, too, which is why they are so eagerly collected. And this is the perfect book for pulp collectors. Every pulp is listed in an easy-to-read format, together with the total number of issues for each publication. Best of all, because of the erratic publishing schedule for many of these periodicals, there is a listing for the date of every issue, so if the publisher skipped a week, or a month, or changed titles for a few issues, the completist will quickly see what the collection lacks. A quick flip to the entry for Black Mask, for example, reveals that it was published from April of 1920 through July of 1951, with a total of 340 issues, making it one of the longest running as well as the best of all mystery pulps. On the other hand, there was only one issue of Crime Fiction Stories, so if you have one and liked it, don't search for another. No pulp fan should be without this massive guide. --Otto Penzler

368 pages, Paperback

First published July 10, 2000

About the author

John Locke is a historian of the American pulp fiction magazines of the first half of the Twentieth Century. He has paid particular attention to the phenomenon of pulp fiction as a writers’ paradise in the boom years of the twenties, to its sudden downfall after the Crash of ’29 into a writers’ ghetto where writers were forced to pound out “speed art” on their typewriters at a penny a word in order to make a living. One of the central characters that evolved in the pulps is the hardboiled detective, in magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective; the central character behind the scenes of the 1930s pulps is the hardboiled writer, a Manhattan denizen thriving on booze and cigarettes, using a typewriter like it was a machine gun, and slowly going nuts. Locke has explored the pulp writing phenomenon in three key works: Pulp Fictioneers (2004), Pulpwood Days: Volume 1: Editors You Want To Know (2007), and Pulpwood Days: Volume 2: Lives of the Pulp Writers (2013).

Locke’s Off-Trail Publications specializes in books which combine vintage pulp fiction reprints with related histories of the era, the authors and the magazines. Gang Pulp is a pioneering look at the violent gangster fiction that came into vogue during the last years of Prohibition. Single author gangster collections include: If She Only Had a Machine Gun , by Richard Credicott (2011); Queen of the Gangsters: Volume 1: Broadwalk Empire , by Margie Harris (2011); and The Gangland Sagas of Big Nose Serrano , by Anatole Feldman, introductions by Will Murray, Volumes 1-3 (2008-09). City of Numbered Men: The Best of Prison Stories (2010) explores the brief reign of hardboiled prison fiction, and includes a 14,000-word profile of Harold Hersey, the most colorful publisher of the pulp era.

Adventure fiction collections include two volumes from Africa explorer Charles Beadle: The City of Baal (2007), and The Land of Ophir (2012); the exquisite Amazon Stories, Volume 1 (2008) and Volume 2 (2009), by Arthur O. Friel; Outdoor Stories , by J. Allan Dunn (2011); and The Golden Anaconda , by Elmer Brown Mason (2009).

Weird detective collections include the popular Weird Detective Adventures of Wade Hammond , by Paul Chadwick, Volumes 1-4 (2006-09); Grottos of Chinatown , by Arthur J. Burks (2009); and The Magician Detective and Other Weird Mysteries , by Fulton Oursler (2010).

Reviews

[Little Timmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb reference book. Collecting listings of all the major and most of the minor pulps produced. If you need to find the books a character appeared in this is the one source to look in. Very recommended