Echt Pulp

There are almost no pulp adventure/mystery magazines left out of the dozens, maybe hundreds (ask Paul DiFilippo) there once were.  So if you have ambitions in that line you have to be very good at doing the sort of thing done there.  David Gates, old chum of mine, often a commenter here,has established himself as one of these, writing true noir (and Western noir!) stories for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery magazine and Ellery Queen and others.  They are good.  Like some --  but not many -- of the old pulp writers Gates is also a fine stylist, master of the -- what shall we call it?  -- American plain ornate? I'll just call it near perfect of its kind, without affectation or a hint of campy knowingness:  the real thing. His Western bounty-hunter is named Placido Geist, and that name will give you a measure of the man by itself. Those tales are to be collected in a volume, and he also has a spy novel in the works  Link to his new Web page with free content to the left.