CHB’s WORLD OF PULP - Paperbacks - Magazines - Movies - Comics
CoolHandBond
Mactan IslandPosts: 7,268MI6 Agent
I’ve been a lover of all things pulp since an early age. There are many viewpoints to what the term pulp means, (some have said that Ian Fleming is a pulp writer - he’s isn’t), so this thread is going to examine what pulp means from my perspective. Facts and figures have been gleaned from elsewhere, everything else is my take on each article that I post.
What is pulp? Pulp is a term that covers material in the printed or visual form which is sensational, lurid and exploitative. It mainly covers the subjects of crime, westerns, horror, science-fiction and sleaze - and many sub-genres within these. Mass-market paperbacks, pulp magazines, dime novels, penny dreadfuls and exploitation movies are only a part of what makes up the term pulp fiction.
This is a personal project but comments and questions are welcomed either on this thread or by PM, should you wish. I will do my best to answer any queries.
The first article will be posted tomorrow.
Comments
The character Nick Carter stretches the entire pulp timeline, so this is a good place to start.
Nick Carter first appeared in 1886 in the New York Weekly story paper. Conceived by Ormond G Smith and written by John R Coryell many adventures were published. When Coryell retired the character was passed to Frederick Dey and he wrote over a thousand stories and dime novels until he committed suicide in 1922. The stories were published in the pulp magazines Nick Carter Weekly, Detective Story Magazine and Nick Carter - Detective.
These would run until the mid-1930’s. Some more novels were published in the 1950’s and then due to the James Bond phenomenon hitting new heights with the release of the movie Goldfinger, in 1964, the character was reinvented as a secret agent in a series of mass-market paperbacks which would run to an impressive total of 261 books from 1964 - 1990.
The books were not credited to any author and were written under the Nick Carter house name but several well known authors contributed to the series including Michael Avallone, Manning Lee Stokes and Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park). The series was immensely popular and sold over 30 million copies during its publishing history. Three publishers would hold the mantle at various times, Award, Ace and Jove (all of whom will have their articles over time). British publishers included Tandem and Sphere.
Carter was given all the OTT attributes of the typical pulp hero trope, tall, handsome, served with the OSS during WW2, practices yoga, fluent in over a dozen languages, basic knowledge of half a dozen more, master of disguise etc. etc. In fact he reminds me a lot of the Derek Flint movie character played by the brilliant James Coburn. He works for an agency called AXE (more secret than the CIA) which is headed by Hawk (M), Della Stokes (Moneypenny) and Geoffrey Poindexter (Q). He is sent on Bond style missions, there are several decent villains, which is a good plus. I have read a good fair number and with all these long series the quality does vary but the best of them are very, very good with the majority passing muster as a good pulp read. If I was going to recommend one to read for those who haven’t read one, I would say The Sea Trap - it’s a genuine first rate thriller written by John Messmann.
Here are a few more in the series…
Nick Carter - not as good as Ian Fleming’s books, of course, but taken as a series it’s good fun. The books were extremely popular in my bookshop and over the years I sold thousands of copies to collectors all wanting to complete their sets.
You're clearly on a roll so I won't interrupt except to say this is great (I definitely read a Nick Carter or two many years ago) and please continue.
what was Nick Carter before being reinvented as a 60s superspy? was he originally a private detective? FBI agent?
Carter was a private detective up until the 50’s. Then there was a lull of about 10 years before the character was reborn as a secret agent (not dissimilar to the lull we have now between Bond 25 and Bond 26!). The 100th book, The Katmandu Contract, included an article on the origin of Nick Carter - Detective, and a short story. I’m not very familiar with the detective side of things so cannot really give much information about it. I did enjoy the spy thrillers though, they were mostly good fun.
261 ??? that's an awful lot of adventures. It is one of the reasons I have never started a Nick Carter read through. I simply don't have time or money to consume that many books [if you start, you really have to end...]. The guy who monitors the website Spy Guys And Gals rates Carter better than Bond. His pulp fiction credentials are numerous though, given his early impression as magazine fare, a titbit I was totally unaware of. The Saint was mostly magazine based too and almost all the short stories and novellas published by Charteris were originally available in The Saint Magazine and other periodicals.
Fortunately I had many customers who wanted the 261 book series!
That Spy Guys site is excellent, but I do not agree with his rating of Carter is better than Bond.
Yes, The Saint had a similar course, but I do not classify Charteris as being a pulp writer, (many do), but this is my own personal opinion of what pulp is, so I won’t be covering The Saint in this thread.
Oh, I don't consider Charteris a pulp writer either. One thing I always attach to 'pulp' is speed and although Charteris wrote fast early in his career, he slowed down and down and down to a virtual stop by 1964. His average of just over one book a year isn't prolific enough.
You don’t have to be a pulp fiction fan to have heard of Mickey Spillane. Ask any book lover to name an author of hard boiled crime books and chances are that Mickey Spillane will be the one mentioned most.
Frank Morrison Spillane was born in Brooklyn in 1918. He began selling stories to pulp magazines soon after graduating from High School and, dropping out of college and frustrated with his sales job, eventually ended up working on comic books. When the war intervened, Spillane became a fighter pilot instructor. After the war he found that comic book work had dried up and he decided to try his hand at writing his first novel and so private detective Mike Hammer was born.
The first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury, was published in 1947 and is a landmark in the development of private-eye fiction. I the Jury sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone.
Over the next five years he wrote another five Mike Hammer books and another novel, The Long Wait, which was filmed with Anthony Quinn. Spillage’s novels featured more sex and the violence and was more overt than the standard detective story and the covers featured scantily dressed women. In the beginning, Mike Hammer's main opponents were gangsters, but this extended to communists and deviants in later novels.
Spillane's other series hero was Tiger Mann, a spy, but in the Mike Hammer mould, which was written to cash in on the James Bond success of the 1960’s.
Spillane also tried his hand at acting and starred as his own Mike Hammer in the movie The Girl Hunters, based on his Mike Hammer book after a 10 year hiatus writing about the character (another half dozen were written after this), and he played an author in an excellent episode of Columbo.
He published a couple of one-off novels (in the Harold Robbins’ vein) in the 70’s with his then wife posing for the covers.
He passed away in 2006 and with sales of over 225 million books he ranks alongside Harold Robbins as the two big names in pulp fiction. His output was not prolific, presumably because he was earning such a lot of money, but his legacy remains forever.
When it comes to pulp in comics then the publisher EC is unquestionably the King. Bill Gaines inherited the company from his father and introduced a whole new range of titles, mainly in the horror, sci-fi and crime genres. He changed the banner from Educational Comics to Entertaining Comics and the rest is history. Concentrating on sensational and lurid stories with ironic twist endings, he hired Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman as editors and hired freelance artists such as Will Elder, Frank Frazetta and Wally Wood to illustrate the stories. Launching titles like Tales From The Crypt and The Vault Of Horror they encouraged relationships with their youthful readership with a lively letters page overseen by the like of The Cryptkeeper. Readers were also encouraged to join a blossoming fan club. A loyal fan base soon followed. The stories were often horrific in content, with grisly scenes of murder and terror, coupled with a twist ending, the comics sold in their hundreds of thousands.
Gloriously illustrated they were lapped up by the youth of America and other titles soon followed, and were all successful…
But Congress were less impressed and blamed comics such as these on the increasing epidemic of juvenile delinquency. A federal investigation was launched and pressure was brought upon the industry to form the CCA, Comics Code Authority. This organisation would vet all publications and an official seal would be printed on the cover should it be passed as fit for reading. Delivery firms were threatened that distribution of non-code comics would result in prosecution, so sales plummeted. Gaines unsuccessfully tried to repeal this decision, he pointed to the fact that one story was rejected because the central character was black, which was racial prejudice, the complaint fell on deaf ears. It wasn’t long before all his titles folded, apart from the satirical magazine, Mad. This continued for some time before Gaines sold the company including the title.
Come the 70’s, and two movies were released using stories from the old comics, Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror. A third was planned, The Haunt Of Fear but when Vault Of Horror was less successful than it’s predecessor the movie was dropped from the schedule. A TV series followed in the 80’s and 90’s and the movie Creepshow was clearly based on the comics. An excellent TV series of Creepshow is currently on it’s 4th season.
The comics have been reprinted in hardcover bound volumes and are highly recommended. Original copies of the comics exchange hands for hundreds of pounds, even in poor condition.
Bill Gaines (1922-1992) King of the pulp comics, a publishing legend,
good writeup on EC!
Thank you for your praise @caractacus potts my knowledge of the comic book world doesn’t compare to yours, so it’s greatly appreciated 🍻
Just a quick question: when did all this hapoen? Trying to get some cultural context.
The featured comics began in 1950 and all had folded by 1955.
The Silver Age of superhero comics began the year afterwards in 1956 when DC comics reintroduced The Flash in Showcase #4.
I have a vague memory of reading b&w reprints of the EC titles (or stories from them at least) in the UK in the 60s. Not Marvel titles, those were reprinted in b&w in comics like "Fantastic", "Terrific" etc and I remember those very clearly but the EC ones.
I don’t think EC stories were reprinted in any British comics. I think you are remembering the Alan Class range of comics which reprinted stories from American publishers such as Atlas and Harvey. An article is scheduled about these comics in this thread at a later date…some examples of Alan Class covers…
And there is also an article due on the comic range you mention including Fantastic and Terrific - these were known as “Power” comics and published by Odhams.
Ballantine Books reprinted some of the EC horror and scifi comics in the mid60s, in the same black-and-white chopped up format as the MAD paperbacks they were also publishing
found a picture of three of them, and an article here . I've got a copy of the scifi collection Tales of the Incredible, sitting right beside my as I type! maybe this is what @Barbel saw when he was a wee lad? The comics have been reprinted in one form or another almost continuously ever since, the publisher Dark Horse is currently reprinting the entire run in a set of archival hardcovers
@CoolHandBond undoubtedly knows this, but the Atlas he speaks of who were also publishing horror comics in the 1950s is actually Marvel, that was what they were calling themselves in those days!
I'd like to learn more about these British reprints if you have more examples CoolHand
It certainly could be, @caractacus potts, thanks for that. Will happily read the article later, can't right now.
CHB, yes "Power" comics- looking forward to your thoughts on them.
Thank you for your input @caractacus potts as usual, very informative, and I had a few of those Ballantine paperbacks pass through my hands over the years. I was specifically identifying British publications that may have reprinted EC stories, I do not know of any that did but would love to know if any publisher actually did so, which is why I mentioned the Alan Class comics which article I will bring forward to posting after the one below, as so much interest is being shown, strike while the iron’s hot, as they say! I will also bring forward the “Power” comics article for @Barbel
It’s nice to know that this thread is gaining views and interaction - the more, the better!
Pulp movies have low budgets and sensational themes. This is the first in a series of articles about what can be considered as pulp on film.
The atom bomb and resulting radiation was seized upon by low budget filmmakers during the 1950’s. A whole slew of pulp movies featuring giant monsters and beautiful girls swept across the silver screen during this decade. The age of beauties and beasties had originated in the classic movie King Kong in1933 but it was to be 20 years later that the first radiation created monster would appear in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Based upon a Ray Bradbury short story, The Fog Horn, this involves the awakening of a long frozen dinosaur after an atom bomb test in the Arctic. It makes it’s way down to New York (as you do) to create havoc and devastation. The monster was created by the master of stop-motion effects, Ray Harryhausen, and excellent it is too. The beauty was played by Paula Raymond as a palaeontologist. In the end the monster is killed by future spaghetti Western star Lee Van Cleef.
The testing of atom bomb also created giant ants in Them! (1954) where James Arness plays an FBI agent, he’s recognisable now because previously he played the monster in the original The Thing From Another World (1951). The beauty here is Joan Weldon, a scientist. Unfortunately she doesn’t have much to do apart from scream from time to time. Them! was originally planned to be a big budget colour movie in 3-D but the bosses at MGM got cold feet and slashed the budget so we got a black and white cheapie instead, although both the movie and the giant ants are impressive. Ironically it became the studio’s biggest grossing movie of the year.
Universal didn’t waste much time noting this fact and the following year they produced Tarantula which had a spider instead of ants doing exactly the same thing. This one has The Man From UNCLE’s chief Leo G Carroll, who develops a serum that grows animals into giants to help solve the food shortage problem. Why he tested it on a tarantula is never explained. This is well directed by Jack Arnold who also gave Clint Eastwood his debut as a fighter pilot sent to drop bombs on the antagonistic spider. The beauty here is lovely Mara Corday who would become Playboy’s Miss October 1958. She became friendly with good old Clint and he cast her in some of his movies, most notably as the waitress in Sudden Impact in the famous “Make My Day” scene. After Tarantula she went on to star in some more monster movies, The Black Scorpion and The Giant Claw. The latter is probably the most inept monster of all, a silly puppet that wouldn’t scare a toddler. This is one of those “so bad it’s good” movies and has to be watched.
Ray Harryhausen was at it again in 1955’s It Came From Beneath The Sea, this time an octopus destroying San Francisco including the Golden Gate Bridge, 30 years before James Bond had his own adventure on it. The budget was so low that poor old Ray could only have five tentacles on his octopus. Beautiful Faith Domergue, who Howard Hughes “discovered” when she was only 16 years old, is the love interest here to Kenneth Tobey (another actor from the original The Thing).
Bert I. Gordon was a producer/director who lived up to his nickname MR. BIG, because he released a flurry of giant monster movies during this decade and continuing well into the 1970’s. King Dinosaur (1955) was his first in this field, shot with a budget of practically nothing. Using stock footage from One Million BC, four scientists fly to the planet Nova and encounter Gila monsters and armadillos. The screenplay was by Tom Gries who would later direct some decent movies including Will Penny and Breakheart Pass. Mr Big had spotted Wanda Curtis in an LA nightclub doing a routine and he signed her up for her big break in movies and she gets put through the mill being thrown around by all and sundry. Next up Bert gave us Earth vs The Spider - a Tarantula rip-off featuring a poorly constructed spider, complete with visible wires. June Kenney does her limited best with everything. She tried so hard that she was given a role in his next one too, Attack Of The Puppet People. But Bert’s movies were never going to make her a star and she gave up acting to move to Las Vegas and got into ranching. In 1957 lovely Gloria Talbott hires pilot James Craig to help her search for her missing fiancée who unbeknown to them has turned into The Cyclops after encroaching on government land and being
turned into a giant creature. Lon Chaney Jr. turns up in this one as well but apparently spent most of the time in a drunken stupor, not surprising seeing who he was working for! Gloria was a genre star, she also made Daughter Of Dr. Jekyll, I Married A Monster From Outer Space and The Leech Woman. Because of the success of drive-in movies, Bert’s low budget releases were making money and Universal gave him the budget to make The Deadly Mantis (1957) which was another rip-off of Them!
There were, of course, scores more of these movies throughout the 50’s but these are the ones that remain in my memory, and for anyone who hasn’t seen any of these, I hope you will search out at least one of them to watch.
Thanks CHB, happy memories there. As can be seen in the Last Film thread, I love these movies and have watched most of them (Them!) more than once.
ALAN CLASS COMICS:
At the ripe old age of 22 Alan Class had already been importing remaindered copies of American comics to sell in British newsagents. To avoid all the hassle of supply and import problems he founded his own publishing company, Alan Class Comics, and signed a contract with American comic strip syndication company, Harvey, to reprint those stories for the British market. He published his first comic Race For The Moon in 1959 and for 30 years his comics were a mainstay of British newsagents, especially seaside towns during the summer months. It sold very well and other one-shots and short series followed when in 1962 the first of his main titles was launched, Creepy Worlds. Secrets Of The Unknown, Suspense Stories, Uncanny Tales, Sinister Tales and Astounding Stories were soon to follow and made up core titles of his output.
Over time, Alan made deals to reprint from several American comic companies including Timely, Atlas, Charlton, ACG and Fawcett, amongst others. Many of these strips were from early stories drawn by the legendary Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. He even managed to strike a deal with Marvel and reprint early superhero strips - this deal ended when Odhams signed an agreement with Marvel to produce their “Power” comics range (of which a follow-up article will be posted at a later date).
Alan was a canny businessman, a lot of his comics were not numbered or dated to prolong shelf life. Furthermore, Alan was quoted as this:
"Every copy was of value to me, and some wholesale houses wanted to 'shred' unsold copies. I insisted that all unsold copies were returned back to me complete ... because during the summer period, May–September, a new market would become available. Beach and coastal resorts were thronged with thousands of holidaymakers with their children, who at certain times had to be kept quiet and happy, and what better way than to read a comic."
Sales were excellent throughout the 60’s and 70’s but with the rise of the specialist comic shop in the UK and the increasing costs of publishing Alan decided to call it a day in 1989, 30 years after starting his business. Today, his comics are eagerly sought after and gain high prices, especially those with the early Marvel reprints where hundreds of pounds per copy exchange hands through dealers and auctions.
In all he published 26 titles and nearly 1500 separate issues amounting to millions of actual copies sold. He truly is one of the UK’s publishing legends. A supreme businessman, Alan is still with us today, aged 86, and long may he enjoy a happy retirement.
thanks for the lesson on the Alan Class comics CoolHand.
I actually have this one, I think its the only example of these British reprint comics in the Potts Archives:
Astounding Stories 52 1966 reprints an adventure of The Fly from Adventures of The Fly 8, September 1960, published by Archie Comics during the period when they were trying to get in on the late 50s superhero revival. Also includes several stories from Marvel's early 60s science fiction genre comics and one by the more obscure publisher ACG. I like the way this comic mixes content from rival American publishers! I wonder if there were any with DC and Marvel in the same book?
hey who can name the source for this cover CoolHand posted above? I can tell you the month it was first published: November 1961
It's the FF, isn't it? A very early one, maybe #1 or 2?
And I DO remember these, CHB!
barbel said: It's the FF, isn't it? A very early one, maybe #1 or 2?
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thats right boss!
Fantastic Four 1, November 1961. one of the most historically important comic books of all time. first superhero comic Marvel published in nearly a decade, it began the self-proclaimed "Marvel Age of Comics", and the start of the interconnected Marvel Universe with its consistent ongoing continuity.
one thing commenters often point out: you wouldnt know this is a superhero comic from the cover, it looks more like another one of Jack Kirby's giant monster comics that had been Marvel's main product for the last several years. You have to look real close to notice the four small characters are demonstrating their superpowers
It’s also interesting to note that Alan Class used more of Jack Kirby’s cover artwork than the Marvel comic - there is more detail shown on the left side.
DC never licensed any of their stories to Alan Class, so a DC/Marvel mix never happened.
Batman appeared in one of the “Power” comics range, but that will have to wait until that article is posted 😁
yes youre right! looks like a full inch has been added
I was thinking it was because the image I linked to is a modern digital copy (note the watermark, it may have been "liberated" from Marvel's online comics service) and contemporary page sizes are narrower than they were in 1961
but heres a link to a genuine original (recently sold for $1.5 million!!) and its left edge cuts off at the same point on the monsters elbow
so either Alan Class had access to Kirby's original art, or another artist retouched the drawing to fill the space
I dont notice the same difference in dimensions in the two versions of the Fly cover, but maybe they reduced the blank space at the top to fill the British format dimensions?
I don’t know the answer to that, if I can find out I will update.
That price is crazy!!! I know it’s in Near Mint condition, but goodness me…
GUY N. SMITH (1939-2020)
Guy Newman Smith is the greatest author of pulp fiction that the UK has ever known. Guy followed his father into a career in banking but it was his love of writing (with much encouragement from his mother) that led him into writing articles about guns and shooting in specialist magazines of the day. He then expanded into writing softcore stories for mens leisure magazines which was very well paid and enabled him to make this job his full time work, along with opening a second-hand bookstore in 1972 (clever fellow 😁). His first horror novel, Werewolf By Moonlight, was published by the pulp paperback publishing house NEL (New English Library) and two sequels thereafter. But it was his cash-in on James Herbert’s The Rats novel that made him a bankable pulp author. Night Of The Crabs (1976) unleashed a horde of giant-sized crabs on a seaside town, destroying everything in its way. Indeed, it set the template for Guy’s writing for decades to follow with lots of animals-on-the-loose books following on over the years, including lots of Crabs sequels and even an origin book. His Bats Out Of Hell novel would gain some notoriety during the Covid pandemic as it predicted the event pretty much as it happened.
He also wrote under several pseudonyms and wrote 4 books for Disney, including Song Of The South, which gets well over £100 a copy on today’s marketplace. A series of copycat “Confessions” books also followed with one of the names Guy used as being Adrian Wood (wonder where he got that name from?) But it’s his horror output that made him famous and he rightly stands at the top of the chart of pulp horror authors.
I met Guy twice, once at the annual convention he held at his home where his fans would come and enjoy the day along with a marvellous buffet provided by Guy’s family, and once when he visited my bookstore, where he was very proud of the shelves full of books under his name. I would be lying if I said I didn’t get him to sign as many books as I could get him to do! He also enjoyed chatting to some of my customers who were there at the time. We used to chat on the telephone occasionally and he always asked how many of his books were being sold! He easily stands in the top 10 of author sales in my bookshop over the years, countless thousands of copies having passed through my hands, thank you, Guy.
Guy died on Christmas Eve 2020 due to complications of Covid, aged 81. He was a gentleman who treated his fans as friends, and is greatly missed.
Never read any of his, though I remember seeing them on the shelves.