The Pulps! ACTION! ADVENTURE! AMAZING THRILLS! Only 10 cents.

[Mr Vim]

I thought everyone would maybe like to talk about the pulps after reading this great article from io9...

http://io9.com/5834890/robots-mad-scientists-and-damsels-astounding-pulp-cover-art-1930+1955

I have not read many pulps, but the few I did were Doc Savage which were truly wonderful. So here's a spot that I thought I'd make for everyone to discuss they're favorite pulp stories, some of their own pulp stories perhaps, or the painful memory of how perhaps a relative threw them all away one day and you could have thousands if not MILLIONS of dollars!

Enjoy...

 

[The Wolf]

I'm a big fan of the hero pulps. Doc Savage was my first and favorite. I've read a variety and enjoy the style of writing.

Sincerely,
The Wolf

 

[Mr Vim]

I realized I wrote the Doc's name wrong, since edited. Shows how many I've read I guess. Anyone take a look at that article? There are some great cover pages on there! A bit risque but that's half the fun I think!

 

[Mahagonny Bill]

I love the old pulps! I have been reading all of the Doc Savage stories in order for the past few years (I am now on 180 out of 181). It's been a hoot reading about Doc using miniature radios the size of shoe boxes and putting Radium in everyone’s shoes in order to track their movements. It's also quite a time warp reading these stories on "smart phone" that even Doc Savage couldn’t have imagined in 1949.

The question is what to read next? The Shadow? The Spider? The Avenger? I'm tempted to move on to the 1970's and read The Destroyer series, which is really a more modern take on the same pulpy format. Any suggestions?

 

[The Wolf]

I would move from Doc to the Avenger, then the Shadow and the Spider after that.
I also recommend Secret Agent X and the Phantom Detective.

Sincerely,
The Wolf

 

[1SG]

Tom Swift.

 

[docneg]

I recently discovered Sanctum Productions has been reprinting The Shadow pulps--two stories to an issue--with the original interior artwork! It was really fun reading a couple of them, since I devoured the paperback reprints back in the '70s. This is much better. Interesting extra features, too. I believe they are doing the same with Doc Savage. Take a look:
http://www.shadowsanctum.com

 

[DesertDan]

Also love "Weird Tales" with Robert E. Howard and H.P Lovecraft stories and "Amazing Stories" as well.

 

[Touchofevil]

I was a huge Robert E. Howard fan as a kid and teen.
Have reread many of his stories in recent years.

 

[Salty O'Rourke]

I devoured all of the Doc Savage paperbacks in the 70s - loved those James Bama covers. Same with The Shadow and The Avenger. I wish someone would digitize the Avenger novels; only a few short stories have been converted to e-text. Thankfully I managed to get all the Shadow and Doc e-texts before Street and Smith started cracking down on the sites that hosted them.

Here's a link you might want to check out - lots of downloadable pulp text files are there. Mostly short stories, they span the gamut from crime to western, adventure, science fiction, etc. New stories are added regularly.

http://pulpgen.com/pulp/downloads/index.html

 

[MikeKardec]

I also was addicted to Doc Savage and Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was a kid. I read 60 or 70 of the Savages and Tarzan and John Carter and all kinds of stuff. I didn't really realize it or appreciate it at the time but my Dad had written for the pulps (Thrilling Adventures) so I also had a fair amount of pulp lore rattling around in my brain. The output of some of those writers was amazing. Pulps were a popular market because, though the slick mags (Sat Eve Post etc) paid much better the pulps they paid on publication rather than acceptance. You could starve to death waiting for a slick magazine to send you a check but as soon as a pulp decided to run your story they dropped one in the mail. $150 to $600 was pretty common money, though some magazine novels by non headliners would go for $900. I knew Leo Margulies, who ran Thrilling Adventures, when I was a kid in the 1970s.

 

[The Wolf]

Now you've got us all intrigued.
I, for one, would love to hear some stories you heard in your youth.

Sincerely,
The Wolf

 

[Mr Vim]

I'll second that!

 

[MikeKardec]

Gosh ... well first of all, while working on a publishing project this morning I actually bothered to dig out Dad's financial records for 1947. Those numbers I quoted, $150 to $600 were way too high. $30 to $80 was more typical pulp fare for a short story. Argosy and Saga (not pulps) paid in the range I mentioned with The Saturday Evening Post going as high as $900 for a short story. My dad was Louis L'Amour and that SEP sale was The Gift of Cochise which became the movie and novel Hondo in later years ... the transition from starving pulp writer to struggling paperback original writer.

Dad wrote scores of stories for Thrilling Adventures, Thrilling Detective, Black Mask, Sky Fighters, etc. I think the most interesting aspect of his conversations with Leo Margulies late in Margulies life were where Leo actually discovered the realities of Dad's life in the time when he was buying Dad's stories. As I mentioned the pay was pretty bad, and Louis was living first on his parents porch in Choctaw, OK then various army bases, then in a 10 by 10 room rented from a family in Hollywood. Leo's only contact with Dad was by mail but after the war he visited with the rather aristocratic lady that Dad was engaged to in those days and had invited Dad to a couple of New York parties when Dad was sitting out the last days of his military service at Ft. Dix. I don't think he wanted to realize the poverty that often accompanied being one of his authors!

To feel like he was getting ahead in the last 1940s, just before the pulp biz started to collapse, Dad tried to sell a story a month. By that time his was better known than in the 1930s but, of course he had to write more than a story a month if he wanted to sell that many. The amount of words those guys could produce was just astounding! I didn't come along until he was well into his 50s, he sure couldn't have afforded a family before that.

I knew a fair number of writers of that period ... all of them could produce like nobody's business.

 

[Worf]

Wow, great topic! I came to the pulps in a round about way. My father, who was basically self taught, worked for the New York City Bridge and Tunnel Authority (I think) back in the 60's. Technically, he was supposed to raise and lower drawbridges in and around the 5 Boroughs. By the 60's river travel in and around New York was a shadow of it's former glory so... he would often walk up and down the bridge looking for things that might have fallen out of various cars. One day he came home with a bag of books, it was full of paperback reproductions of of the Doc Savage stories. I took one look at "The Man of Bronze" his shirt torn, muscles rippling and I was hooked.

I read all the Doc Savage books I could find then stopped for a while. In the early 70's Marvel began publishing R.E. Howards "Conan" comics and I found a new fascination. The comics, drawn by Barry Windsor Smith lead me back to the stories of Howard and the Lancer books with their Frazetta covers. I read all of those till I grew tired of L. Sprague De Camp. Recently I've begun reading "The Shadow" and enjoying that. Cheap paper and florid prose maybe but high adventure definately.

Worf

 

[MikeKardec]

The Doc Savage stories were fantastic but certainly on the bleeding edge of what was acceptable in 'realistic' pulp adventure. Often pretty far out but more in the realm of reasonable sci fi than comic book silliness. Finding that line is something many who have attempted to imitate the pulp style have failed at. They were full of gadgets and out there science but Lester Dent (the real name of the writer of most of them) knew his stuff, I've heard he invented one of the first automatic telephone answering machines and a treasure locating device that was good enough that the Navy used aspects of it in war time mine sweepers.

It's amazing how many people never really understood the actual genre of the pulp adventure. I have a fond memory of dad and I going to a very early showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark and when we got to the scene with the temple and the snakes he leaned over and said, "I think I wrote this." He elbowed me again when we got to the boxing scene at the flying wing. Those two bit may have come from his stories South of Suez and Wings Over Brazil ... or not, the snakes scene is also very reminiscent of a moment in one of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar novels and the flying wing scene was only vaguely like the one in dad's story. There was, however, a sense that someone involved in that film understood what the pulps were all about ... they were over the top but not silly, illogical or ignorant. The one moment in Raiders that went into silly territory was the bit with Indy climbing onto the submarine ... writers of that era knew that subs only submerged to attack. The spiritual or religious aspects of Raiders may not have been accepted by all pulp editors of the time but they were well done and had a logic of their own.

The following Indiana Jones films went into areas and contained material that just didn't fit the pulp style as I see it, containing more and more 'submarine moments.' That doesn't mean I didn't appreciate them but the feeling of the pages of Thrilling Adventures coming to life was gone. I've always wondered if it was only Phillip Kaufman or Lawrence Kasdan who really 'got it' and everyone afterwards just flunked the test. Interestingly, the excellent first scene of Temple of Doom was originally an additional adventure in early drafts of the Raiders script ... You can tell just by looking at it.