Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers

by Lee Server

Beginning in the 19th century, a series of cheaply made books and magazines launched an innovative form of fiction that would redefine popular literature for years to come. "Pulp", originally referring to the low-quality pages on which these stories were printed, came to describe mass-produced, affordable fiction, characterized by imaginative, often sensational plots that appealed to everyday readers. Today, pulp fiction is recognized as a vital component of popular culture and has attracted both an academic and mainstream following in recent years.

'Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers' is the first reference book of its kind to bring together the famous and lesser-known writers who shaped popular literature. From bestselling authors to "underground" wordsmiths, more that 200 entries profile the inventors of such genres as the western, hardboiled detective novel, spy thriller, science fiction, horror, legal thriller, crime fiction and romance novel.

Authors covered include Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, H P Lovecraft, Chester Himes, Zane Grey, Ian Fleming, Leigh Brackett, Barbara Cartland, V C Andrews.

Surveying brand-name legends and obscure or forgotten authors, each entry presents a brief biography and a list of the author's writing credits, including works written under pseudonyms. Complete with cross-references, an index, and a bibliography, and enhanced by photos of writers as well as by illustrations of vintage book and magazine covers, 'Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers' is equally satisfying for historians, students, fans of popular fiction, and general readers.

Genres: Reference, Pulp

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

Lee Server specialises in books on popular culture and literary history.

He is the critically acclaimed author of such as 'Danger Is My Business: The Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines' (1993), 'Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback' (1995) and the biography 'Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care' (2001).

Reviews

[Phillip Fuller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book deals with writing for pulp magazines and pulp paperbacks which are produced for the mass entertainment market. Pulp fiction is written for the working not educated class that seeks artistic literature. The pulps created fiction with speed and using formulas that were time tested characters and plots to attract readers. The writers in this book range from those who lived adventurous lives to those who wrote stories from research materials. Some of these authors like O Henry and Chester Himes don't seem to belong here because they had literary value and there are some like L Ron Hubbard that got left out. I found the book to be interesting and an important resource for the true fan of this type of fiction.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

review of
Lee Server’s Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 18-22, 2023

For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticP...

I read this over a fairly extended period of time (maybe over half a yr?). As I went along, I found writers that Server’s description of piqued my curiousity to the point where I usually found something by them online, ordered it, &, in some cases, read before I even finished the Encyclopedia.

The back cover has this promotional 1st paragraph:

“Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jacqueline Susann, Raymond Chandler and V. C. Andrews, Ian Fleming and Mario Puzo. Over the past 100-plus years, such writers have developed the genre of popular, or pulp, fiction. From early dime novels to contemporary mass market paperbacks, pulp fiction has become a vital part of popular culture.”

This conflation of pulp w/ popular bothered me a little. I don’t usually have much interest in pop culture, I much prefer the ‘lunatic fringe’, wch is where I, personally, ‘belong’ (if I ‘belong’ anywhere). Popular culture has limits to it that get in the way of maximum creativity. After all, it must SELL, wch means that the people doing the spending must have it play into the LCD (Lowest Common Denominator), wch can be very low indeed.

W/ this in mind, I found the mixture of people presented under the same heading to be fascinating. I read something like 17 E. R. Burroughs novels in quick succession when I was about 13. I didn’t even think that highly of them at the time but I sure did enjoy them. I love Chandler’s writing & he was one of the people who got me to be enthusiastic about crime fiction. Contrarily, I’ve never had the slightest interest in Jacqueline Susann, V. C. Andrews, Ian Fleming, & Mario Puzo. SO, for me, it’s hard to lump those writers together.

SOO, even tho I agree that all those writers are (or were) popular & I take Server’s very knowledgable word for it that they were all published in the pulps, I still associate writers published there to be more struggling creative people getting their 1st chance to be read by a sizeable public, their 1st chance to make a little money, an entry into a dream of being able to support themselves off of what they love. In other words, whether they were popular or not is of lesser importance to me than whether there was an outlet allowing them to get their foot in the door. &, of course, most importantly is whether I think the writing’s great or not. I often do. Even when I don’t I also often find the plots engaging.

Excuse me while I quote at length from the Introduction:

“The history of sensational literature is a long one. The earliest cave paintings show narratives of bloodshed and giant beasts. Plato wrote in Timaeus of the lost world of Atlantis, that staple of the fantasy genre, and Homer’s Odyssey and the age-old tales of the Arabian Nights were the pulp fiction of their day. Stories of space travel, like Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Voyage to the Moon, date back to the 1600s, as do the first crime stories, peddled by hawkers to the crowds at public hangings.

“Pulp, a species of popular fiction writing with which this encyclopedia is concerned, draws from that long history. Originally used to describe a mere physical characteristic of the periodicals of the 1880s to 1950s whose pages were made from the cheapest grade of pulpwood paper, the word came to have an expanded meaning both categoric and aesthetic: pulp as a genus of imaginative reading matter distinguished by mass production, affordability, an intended audience of common as opposed to elite readers, a dependence on formula and genre; and pulp as a literature aimed at the pleasure centers of the reader, primarily concerned with sensation and escape, variously intended to excite, astonish, or arouse.

“Pulp as defined above owes its existence to revolutionary developments in the 19th century, enlightened and industrious years before which the possibilities for a truly popular literature were severely restricted. Few people could read, for one thing.” - p xi

Interesting. Does anything equivalent to the pulps exist now? Perhaps, but it doesn’t seem that way to me, maybe I’m missing something. I’m glad we have POD (Print On Demand) publishing but, alas, the printer I use prevents cheap prices. SOOO, as if my content weren’t forbidding enuf, the machinations of the marketplace are even more killer. An example: the company I use demands that people providing the content offer a 40% discount for US bkstores, say the US branches of Barnes & Noble. That means that if the bk I get printed costs me $11.00 a copy that I have to charge $20.00 a copy to be able to make ONE dollar off it. The bkstore doesn’t have to buy any, it just advertises it in its catalog. If someone finds it online & buys it from B&N then hypothetically B&N make $8, I make $1, & the printer makes $11 (w/ everyone subtracting expenses). Since the bkstore has a 40% discount they can offer ‘deals’ for the buyer by making the price 10% off, e.g.. That makes the price $18.00. They still make $6, etc.. Now, if this mandatory discount were removed, the author might be able to sell the bk for $15.00, 25% less - or even $12.00, 40% less. I’d be much more likely to sell copies for $12.00 than I am for $20.00.

In my own history of sensationalist reading I’d add in the time of the French revolution. Printers were abundant, cheap bks, chapbks, were plentiful, often promoting content that was undesirable to the aristocracy. Restif de la Bretonne, who was a printer by trade, wrote & published 180 bks. People cd propose revolutionary ideas & have these ideas be widespread, bypassing official approval, contributing to the revolution. A chapbk that I contributed to that pays homage to that era & the time of the American revolution is “Heretical Thoughts on the New Normal”: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book202... .

“The popular fiction magazine created the need for a new species of writer—namely, the hack. Industry took precedence over artistry, with primary concers for schedules, reliability, and steady product.” - p xii

To quote from my review of Norvell Page's Reign of the Silver Terror:

“STILL, given that these novella-length stories had to be churned out one a mnth to meet the deadlines, Page's production of almost ONE HUNDRED Spider stories is mind-boggling. I've only read this one so I don't know how repetitive he was but even attempting to produce that much w/ the pace of the stories being what they are wd've been an amazing accomplishment.” - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

“The pulp magazine made its first appearance in 1882, the year Frank Munsey launched a cheap fiction weekly for children which he called The Golden Argosy. The magazine evolved into Argosy, a thick—nearly 200 pages—all-fiction periodical for adults, offering some 135,000 words of fiction and a little poetry, crowded into ugly blocks of black type and printed on the cheapest paper available.” - p xii

“in Britain startling developments like the largely violent, racist skinhead movement were chronicled in book form almost exclusively in the cheap, sensationalist paperbacks.” - p xv

As opposed to the United States where there was the prestigious 28 volume hard-cover Encyclopedia of Violent Racist Neo-Nazi Skinheads that sold so well there were even door-to-door salesmen.

Just kidding.

By p 2 I was already interested in an author I hadn’t previously heard of.

“Achmed Abdullah was born Alexander Nicolayevitch Romanoff to a grand duke father and a high-born Afghani Muslim mother in czariat Russia. Raised in Afghanistan, where he assumed his Asian title of Prince Nadir Khan, he was educated at Eton and Oxford, then became a gentleman officer in the British army, keeping the peace along the Khyber Pass and in assorted colonies in Africa. He became a writer in the early 1900s, establishing the name of Achmed Abdullah as an erudite teller of thrilling stories and an elegant stylist whose work appeared in numerous periodicals and pulp magazines.” - p 2

I’ll bet no-one ever accused him of leading a dull life. See my review of his The Bungalow on the Roof: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .

& the very next entry is Cleve Adams, another writer of interest that I’d never heard of.

“The missing link between Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy, Cleve Adams wrote rambunctious, violent, corrosively cynical private eye fiction from the mid-1930s until his untimely death from pneumonia in 1949 at the age of 54.”

[..]

“Adams has been accused of writing from a pro-fascist perspective. Adams’s “hero” McBride in Up Jumped the Devil (1943) does in fact bark that “an American Gestapo is goddam well what we need . . .” and Adams’s mysteries are filled with unplesantries about women, foreigners, and miscellaneous races and religions. But Adams, to paraphrase Ellroy on Ellroy, is writing about bad white men doing bad things, and his poliitical viewpoint seems less ultra-right-wing than nihilistic, creating a nasty landscape full of chauvinist pigs, rotten cops, crooked politicians, rich slatterns, and sadists—a big, ugly, wisecracking world of everyday corruption.” - p 3

I didn’t rush right out & buy anything by Adams b/c I admit that the above description left me w/ too many misgivings. Maybe someday. & on to the very next entry & I’m, once again, intriqued.

“Allain, Marcel
(1885-1969) and
Pierre Souvestre
(1874-1914)

“”Fantomas.”
“What did you say?”
“I said: Fantomas.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Nothing. . . . Everything!”
“But what is it?”
“Nobody. . . . And yet, yes, it is somebody!”
“And what does the somebody do?”
“Spreads terror!”

“The famous poster introduced a new literary creation, super-criminal Fantomas, to the Paris of 1911: a malevolently bored masked man in evening clothes posing astride the entire helpless city like an elegant Colossus.”

[..]

“the Fantomas series was also embraced by the intelligentsia and by artists and poets of the nascent dad/surrealist movements who found the series’ anarchic spirit exhilirating. “Full of life and imagination,” said Guillaume Apollinaire. “From the imaginative standpoint Fantomas is one of the richest works that exist.” “Magnificent lyricism!” said Jean Cocteau. “The modern Aeneid!” averred Blaise Cendrars. The legend of Fantomas grew even mightier with the almost immediate adaption of the series to silent film by master director Louis Feuillade.” - p 4

Intrigued by Surrealist references to Feuillade’s version of Fantomas I sought it out & eventually got to witness it. Alas, when I did it didn’t do much for me. I suspect that what was marvelous for the Surrealists in the early 20th century has become a bit thin for a jaded movie-lover like myself - wch isn’t to say that I can’t appreciate silent films - Murnau’s “Faust”, Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera”.. these are works that’ll probably please me for life. For that matter I recently witnessed Hitchcock’s “Murder!” (a sound film from 1930) & thought it was utterly brilliant.

& then there’s Richard Allen. I 1st heard of him thru a former friend, Stewart Home, who had the inspired idea to exploit Allen’s exploitation w/ rewrites.

“Allen, Richard (James Moffat)
(1922-1993)

“Simmering behond the good vibes of hippiedom and swinging London as the 1960s came to a close was another, less friendly British cultural movement, one built not on peace and love but on suspicion, resentment, racism, and violence. Media reports exposed the rise of white, working-class youth gangs, new cults of juvenile delinquency involved in riots and violent incidents, some of it aimed at the United Kingdom’s rising immigrant population, a great deal of it centered on explosive soccer (football) team fandom. The most intimidating of these antisocial groups were the “skinheads,” angry young people uniformly clad in blue jeans or army trousers, union shirt, suspenders, steel-tipped boots, hair shaved to the scalp (a pointed rebuke to those long-haired hippies), many with a right-wing, white supremacist political orientation.” - p 5

“Richard Allen was in fact James Moffat, a Canadian-born writer with Celtic roots and hundreds of books and nearly as many pen names to his credit. He had studied law at Queen’s University
in Canada but dropped out to write and wander the world. For a time he published a magazine about bowling. He lived in Hollywood and Mexico and more than once lost all his savings at the gambling tables in Las Vegas.” - p 6

On to a writer I have read, albeit only one bk.

“Ambler, Eric
(1909-1998) Also wrote as: Eliot Reed

“If Eric Ambler was not the inventor of the “modern” spy novel—that title must go to the English novelist Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) for a single, autobiographical work, Ashenden—he was certainly among the first few authors to establish the boundaries and possibilities for such a genre.” - pp 8-9

& then there’s a woman Ambler I’ve never heard of.

“Ambler, Dail (Betty Mabel Lilian Williams)
(1919-1974) Also wrote as Danny Spade

“This obscure hard-boiled novelist deserves greater acclaim as a rare female holding her own amidst an otherwise fraternal order of hack crime fiction writers in postwar Britain. Under the Ambler and then Danny Spade pen names, she churned out a series of tougher-than-tough detective novels about a hard-drinking, fist-flying, frequently-screwing Manhattan private eye, first-person narrator Spade—perhaps the long-lost borther of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade? The stories, and the style, were less Hammett than Spillane gone nutty, crammed with sex, violence, and a jolly good try at the slang of American mean streets.” - p 11

Well, I’m sure you’re starting to get the idea, I’m only 11pp into the main body of the encyclopedia & I’ve already found most of the entries too fascinating to not quote at least a little. Just keeping track of the pen names of many of these writers is a difficulkt task.

“Avallone, Michael
(1924-1999) Also wrote as Nick Carter, Troy Conway, Priscilla Dalton, Dorothea Nile, Edwina Noone, Vance Stanton, Sidney Stuart” - p 18

By p 25, I’d marked Marc Behm as “seems interesting” so, once again, I bought one of his bks, read it & reviewed it: Eye of the Beholder: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... . By p 28 we get to Earl Derr Biggers, the author of the Charlie Chan bks, & someone I have a continuing interest in.

“A Harvard-educated journalist and for many years a columnist at the Boston Herald, Biggers made his mark as a popular novelist at the age of 29 with a comic mystery called Seven Keys to Baldpate” [ https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ] “, about a mystery writer trying to get through the night at a seemingly haunted old inn. George M. Cohan (author of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) turned the novel into a hit Broadway play that became a perennial favorite of small-town theater companies, and the property was subsequently turned into a motion picture no fewer than five times. But this was nothing compared to the welcome Hollywood gave to another of Biggers’s creations.” - p 28

I’ve never had much interest in the Western genre.. at least not until I realized that many Western movies had interesting sidekicks to the main romantic good guy. One Western, “Arizona Stagecoach” (1942), has a ventrilloquist’s figure as a character presented as if they’re just another person PLUS an upside-down hanging singing cowboy PLUS good bird imitation whistling PLUS stereoscopes PLUS swastikas PLUS card tricks. I doubt that many people realize this side of Westerns, the wackier side. 1936’s “Man of the Frontier” has the great Smiley Burnette w/ some fantastic novelty music scenes. These have, if I remember correctly, home-made instrument inventions. ANYWAY, I don’t know whether the novels have any such things (I doubt it) but I can at least recommend those 2 movies.

“Brand, Max (Frederick Schiller Faust)
(1892-1944) Also wrote as: George Owen Baxter, Walter Butler, George Challis, Evan Evans, John Frederick, Frederick Frost, David Manning, Peter Henry Morland

“The man who would do as much or more than anyone to popularize the mythical dimensions of the American West and to make cowboy fiction the most popular of all pulp genres professed to find the actual West “disgusting,” and wrote most of his popular tales of cowboys and the American frontier while sprawled amidst the Renaissance splendors of his villa near Florence, Italy.” - p 35

Ha ha! That’s almost enuf to make me want to read them! There’re so many writers who wrote detailed fiction about ‘exotic’ locales w/o ever actually visiting them. Jules Verne, perhaps the epidome of the writer of marvelous travel stories, didn’t actually go to the places that he wrote about.

& we get to another writer I’ve already had an appreciation for.

“Brown, Fredric
(1906-1972)

“”A genius of sorts,” his friend and fellow writer Walt Sheldon called Fredric Brown. “He was a compulsive storyteller; and made up stories or bits of stories in his every waking moment. Wherever he went he would look at something or somebody . . . and say to himself, ‘What if?’”

“That compulsive imagination, plus an unpredictable way with plot and a playful, impish desire to provoke and shock were the building blocks of Brown’s unique, ingenious body of work. An anomalous figure in many ways, Brown was the pulp writer who upset the pulp clichés. A writer of tough and shocking scenes who was also one of the funniest American writers, he was among the rare genre writers who wrote science fiction and crime fiction with equal flair and inventiveness. Even rarer, he could blithely mix genres and styles without losing his way or his chance at any another publisher’s paycheck.” - p 41

Another genre I haven’t investigated is JD Lit. Having grown up w/ plenty of JDs I’m happy to get away from them.

For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticP...

[Gerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most useful work of reference and a superb read, 'Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers' has more than 200 entries for writers of this type of fiction. Obviously there are hundreds more but identifying them and getting information on them, who by the nature of their work and their use of pseudonyms were probably less well-known than many writers. (It has made me consider going through my shelves and identifying what I feel is pulp fiction and listing names of other authors of the genre ... what for I am not sure, amusement perhaps!)

An excellent historical introduction begins with the senational literature of the 19th century and works its way through the Edwardian era to the heyday of the pulps, the 1920s and 1930s, when such as 'Black Mask' and 'Amazing Stories' were at their zenith. The author then points out that although in the 1970s and 1980s pundits decried the death of the novel and the "new illiteracy", pulp fiction continued to find its way onto the market.

Then comes the author entries, all most fascinating and it is a delight to find some names therein that match pulp fiction on one's shelves. Everyone will have their own interpretation of pulp fiction and its writers but there are some unusual entries in the list of authors. Is Ian Fleming really a pulp fiction writer? I appreciate that James Bond was not immediately successful but whether the novels fit into the pulp fiction category is debatable. Others that raise eyebrows are such as Grace Metalious of 'Peyton Place' fame, and, whatever one thinks of Jackie Collins's novels, is she truly a pulp fiction writer in the true meaning of the genre? Debatable perhaps.

This does not detract from the book which is a must for collectors of this field and an invaluable reference work to be dipped into at any time.

[J.M. Hatchet · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best references for pulp writers and those who love pulp. I use this for researching authors and pen names, and it's fun to read some of the bios. These folks worked, y'all. The work ethic of some of the writers in this volume is astounding.

Get inspired! Learn more about pulp fiction! And remember, trash and darkness are forever.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee Server knows his subject matter well! A must for those who like to read - and 'pulp' writing and its writers are the underbelly of all literature.

I revisited my favorites as well as discovered some new names in this volume. A wonderful wonderful book.

[Ó Ruairc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great source for anyone interested in the early writers of pulp fiction. This encyclopedia contains short bios of each writer, as well as listings of the novels and stories they wrote. Excellent!