The female of the species

 

Never trust a dame, beware the broad - they'll turn on you when the chips are down, twist the knife  - least according to the pulps and I use the term, pulp in its broadest sense to include the cheap, slim paperbacks that filled the shops for years, published by the likes of Dell, Gold Medal, Ace and Lancer. In the true sense they were not pulps but they most certainly carried the pulp spirit.

A femme fatale tries to achieve her hidden purpose by using feminine wiles such as beauty, charm, and sexual allure. The phrase translated from the French means deadly woman.


"She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens." Raymond Chandler



In the pulps women always had a hidden agenda - at first they would appear weak and in need of protection but as the story unfolds they would inevitably show their true colours. The kitten would display its claws. The women of the pulps were built strictly for titillation - they were not the type of girls you'd feel comfortable bringing home to meet your mum, least not if you wanted to hang on to your inheritance.


"A really good detective never gets married. " Raymond Chandler

"She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket. " Raymond Chandler

"Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable. " John D. McDonald






Women in the pulps would often appear sweet and innocent but as the reader learned more she would transform from damsel in distress to  psychobitch, always willing to use her nubile pink body (nubile pink body, or variation of such, seems to be a description favoured by pulp writers) to get what she wanted. To the pulp babe the body was as much a weapon as the snub nosed revolver she kept hidden in her purse. Or, for that matter, the sticks of TNT disguised as a lipstick.

Female protagonists were rare in the pulps but that's not to say they didn't exist - Cornell Woolrich wrote a story called Angel Face which was about a women on the vengeance trail that was published in Dime Detective in 1935 with its title changed to Murder in Wax. The story is collected in The Big Book of Pulps edited by Otto Penzler which has an entire section devoted to the pulp babes. Here you will find stories by Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and a host of less remembered luminaries of the pulp years.

There is however a great article on female pulp writers HERE

Later as the cheap mass market paperbacks started to replace the pulps there were scores upon scores of exploitative fiction hitting the shelves. These books, pornography really, took the exploitation of women to a degree the original pulps would never have dared.

Lesbian thrillers were hugely popular and numbered in their hundreds. And if women weren't engaged in lesbian acts it was only because they were otherwise busy killing, lying, stealing, drugging, drinking or swinging . Much of this was due to the fact that almost exclusively it was men writing for the pulps and the cheap mass market paperbacks. Of course there were some women writers but these were few and far between.


During the Sixties and Seventies, the height of the sexual revolution, it was the age of crude exploitative fictions. Where in the past it had been mystery and murder, with a subtle hint of sex, that had driven the industry it was now very much sex pushed to the forefront bringing everything else with it. And whilst the covers of these books displayed more nudity than the early pulps and paperbacks the artwork was very much in the same style. Some of the writing though was positively pornographic.

"One moment I'd be drawing a dame with a gun in her hand and the next project I'd do the same dame with her tits out.' Steve Bilkins, pulp artist, told Pulp Collector in an interview in 1973.













This was a world away from the 1950's when the Hank Janson books were accused of obscenity.










Ironically these lesbian thrillers, written one handed with young male readers very much in mind, were popular with a large gay female readership.

Stephanie Foote, from the University of Illinois commented on the importance of lesbian pulp novels to the lesbian identity prior to feminism.

"Pulps have been understood as signs of a secret history of readers, and they have been valued because they have been read. The more they are read, the more they are valued, and the more they are read, the closer the relationship between the very act of circulation and reading and the construction of a lesbian community becomes...Characters use the reading of novels as a way to understand that they are not alone."


These days we've moved on both in society and in our reading and women in fiction are much more rounded, real people than they were in the days of the pulps and mass market paperback nasties.


Indeed in the modern world many of the truly great writers are women and the exploitative paperbacks are merely relics of less enlightened times. The pulps live on though and authors like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Paul M. Cain and Mickey Spillane are immortal and the concept of the femme fatale they helped shape is very much a part of the modern psyche. The Hard Case Crime series continues the long tradition of the femme fatale though and she's just as tough as ever.

Vintage Paperbacks

I'm pleased with my latest haul from Cardiff's Troutmark Books - I'm especially pleased with the Executioner paperbacks as all of these are early entries in the series, and actually written by Don Pendleton himself. The author wrote 37 of the books in the long running series which as of Jan 2014 numbered 423 titles.

The Executioner books were everywhere when I was a kid, and I read one or two of the titles but I always leaned more towards the western paperbacks which, like the Executioner books, were aimed at a male adult readership.

 The titles are Nightmare in New York (book 7), Assualt on Soho (book 6) and Boston Blitz (book12). Of course all of the books are standalone novels and I'm looking forward to catching up on these classics of a bygone period in publishing, and all are in pretty good condition and make nice additions to my collection of classic paperbacks.

Company K by William March I'd never heard of but picked it up because of the World War 1 setting. According to the WIKI, March had a lot of critical respect but was never attained popular status with the reading public. Apparantly Company K was based on his own wartime experiences and I'm looking forward to reading this. This edition was published Corgi Books in 1968 with a cover price of 3s 6d and apparently the novel is still in print today. I've moved this to the top of my TBR pile and it'll likely be the next book I read.

I rounded off my haul with two westerns - the second book in the Hawk series by William S. Brady and the fifth book in the short lived but excellent Gunslinger series.

A revolution in reading circa 1935

Educationally Alan Lane was said to be average – he left grammar school in Bristol at the age of 15 and was not particularly literary but this man revolutionised the entire book publishing industry. From school he went to work for his uncle at the publisher Bodley Head and he immediately took to the job but he felt that the publishing industry could be much bigger than it was.

It was Lane who started the iconic publishing house, Penguin - The idea for the publishing house came when Allen was waiting for a train to take him from Exeter back to London. He went into a bookshop to look for something to read and all he found were badly produced, low quality books with gaudy covers. He realised that there was a gap in the market for high quality, well-designed paperbacks available to everyone at the price of a packet of cigarettes. The books had a uniform look and were indeed priced cheaply – the first books cost sixpence.

Paperback were not a new idea but most of the books on the market in those days was totally forgettable – what Lane decided was that the new line would print quality books, the kind one would usually find in hardcover, at an affordable price

“'We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.”
Allen Lane

The first Penguin paperbacks appeared in the summer of 1935 and included works by Ernest Hemingway, Andr. Maurois and Agatha Christie. They were colour coded (orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime) and cost just sixpence, the same price as a packet of cigarettes. The way the public thought about books changed forever - the paperback revolution had begun.

A uniform appearance

Penguin became a separate company in 1936 and set up premises in the Crypt of the Holy Trinity Church on Marylebone Road, using a fairground slide to receive deliveries from the street above. Within twelve months, it had sold a staggering 3 million paperbacks. Traditional publishers tended to view Penguin with suspicion and uncertainty, as did some authors but by now the writing was on the wall and the paperback was going to fast become the dominant selling medium for books of all kinds.

During the war there was a slip inside each paperback that asked the reader to drop the book off at a post office when finished with it, so it could be sent to the troops. This resulted in Penguin being given a much more generous paper ration from the government than most other publishers.

“A Penguin could fit into a soldier's pocket or his kit bag. It was especially prized in prison camps.”
Martin Bell

During the Sixties Penguin had long lost the monopoly on cheap but paperbacks of quality, but the company continued to push the envelope. Their choices of acquisitions were daring and led to the celebrated obscenity trial over Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Penguin was charged under the obscene publications act but fought back and was acquitted, marking a turning point in British censorship laws. People formed huge queues to buy the book and Penguin sold 2 million copies in six weeks.

When Alan Lane died in 1970 tributes flowed in from the literary world – a far cry from the early days when it was thought that Lane’s paperback revolution would cheapen and destroy the publishing industry. It’s now been 75 years since Lane first set up Penguin and once again we are looking at another revolution in reading but this time it is a paperless medium that challenges the dominance of the traditional industry and much the same things that were said about the paperbacks are being said about eBooks and make no bones about, for just as paperbacks prospered then so too shall the eBook.

Worth reading:

Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane

Jeremy Lewis

ISBN: 0670914851

Synopsis

A stocky, dapper Bristolian who left school at the age of sixteen to work for his uncle at The Bodley Head and went on to found Penguin Books, Allen Lane was the greatest publisher of the twentieth century, and a major influence on the cultural and political life of post-war Britain. He did not invent the paperback, but he revolutionised our reading habits by his insistence that the best writing in the world should be made available for the price of a packet of cigarettes.
Though never a bookish man himself, Lane was adept at sensing the spirit of the age and always ready to follow his hunches: he commissioned Nikolaus Pevsner to write the Buildings of England, gave his backing to John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing, arguably the finest literary magazine of its times, risked prosecution by publishing James Joyce's Ullyses for the first time in this country, and a quarter of a century later appeared at the Old Bailey to defend Penguin's publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, thereby anticipating the liberal reforms of the 1960s.
A mischievous, quixotic, oddly endearing figure who loathed meetings and paperwork - a German visitor was shocked to find an editorial meeting taking place in a rowing boat, and well lubricated with gin - Lane combined ruthlessness with affability, courage with moral cowardice, loyalty with unpredictability. Few publishers are remembered after their lifetimes: Allen Lane is a rare exception to the rule.

PAPERBACK COLLECTOR

Had a hour to kill in Cardiff earlier this afternoon and so I drifted into Troutmark Books, a fine used book store in the Castle Arcade. Came away with another great stash of books.

Three Max Brand's Gunman's Goal, Galloping Broncos and The Big Trail - fine literary westerns. The writer's actual name was Frederick Schiller Faust. He was the author who created, among others, the character of Destry which was filmed most memorably with James Stewart in the role.

Slocum and the Helpless Harlots - which is another in the long running Slocum series by Jake Logan. Logan is a pen name that many writers have used including the prolific James Reasoner. Can anyone tell me who was responsible for this one?

I was pleased to find Edge no 9 - Bloody Summer as I collect the series and this title is one of the six I need (five now) to complete the run. And for £1.95 - can't be bad.

Two Dirty Harry novelisations - Dirty Harry and Sudden Impact - I'm not usually keen on novelizations but I'm trying to complete my collection of Dirty Harry tie-in fiction so these'll slot in nicely. I've heard good things about the Sudden Impact novelization so I may try that first.

I was especially pleased to find a copy of the Penguin 1990 edition of Riders of the Purple Sage - next to Owen Wister's The Virginian this is one of the most influential westerns of them all. This edition features the essay by Jane Tompkins which gives an interesting take on the history of both the author and this title.

Two Guy N. Smith horror novels - Crabs Moon and The Black Fedora - I used to read Guy as a kid and since then I've come to know him as a fellow pipe enthusiast, and I'm trying to collect his back list. I've a few to go yet, though.

Cop Hater by Ed McBain - this is a nice edition of the book that started the 87th precinct series way back in 1956 - this edition features an introduction written by McBain shortly before his death in 2005

The gem here is a Thriller Book Club 1957 edition of James Hadley Chase's, The Guilty are Afraid. The book was originally published in 1957 and although this is not a first edition proper it is a first Thriller Book Club edition and in excellent condition. Clean unmarked boards, none of the pages loose and great cover artwork. Not that first editions matter to me - I'm a collector but not that sort of collector. If a book appeals to me then I have to have it and this one sure did appeal. There' a detailed Crime Time article on the author HERE

BEWARE THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

Never trust a dame, beware the broad - they'll turn on you when the chips are down, twist the knife when it's well and truly sunk in your back - least according to the pulps and I use the term, pulp in its broadest sense to include the cheap, slim paperbacks that filled the shops for years, published by the likes of Dell, Gold Medal, Ace and Lancer. In the true sense they were not pulps but they most certainly carried the pulp spirit.

A femme fatale tries to achieve her hidden purpose by using feminine wiles such as beauty, charm, and sexual allure. The phrase translated from the French means deadly woman.


"She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens." Raymond Chandler



In the pulps women always had a hidden agenda - at first they would appear weak and in need of protection but as the story unfolds they would inevitably show their true colours. The kitten would display her claws. The women of the pulp were built strictly for titillation - they were not the type of girls you'd feel comfortable bringing home to meet your mum, least not if you wanted to hang on to your inheritance.


"A really good detective never gets married. " Raymond Chandler

"She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket. " Raymond Chandler

"Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable. " John D. McDonald






Women in the pulps would often appear sweet and innocent but as the reader learned more she would transform from damsel in distress to a psychopath, always willing to use her nubile pink body (nubile pink body, or variation of such, seems to be a description favoured by pulp writers) to get what she wanted. To the pulp babe the body was as much a weapon as the snub nosed revolver she kept hidden in her purse. Or, for that matter, the sticks of TNT disguised as a lipstick.

Female protagonists were rare in the pulps but that's not to say they didn't exist - Cornell Woolrich wrote a story called Angel Face which was about a women on the vengeance trail that was published in Dime Detective in 1935 with its title changed to Murder in Wax. The story is collected in The Big Book of Pulps edited by Otto Penzler which has an entire section devoted to the pulp babes. Here you will find stories by Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and a host of less remembered luminaries of the pulp years.

There is however a great article on female pulp writers HERE

Later as the cheap mass market paperbacks started to replace the pulps there were scores upon scores of exploitative fiction hitting the shelves. These books, pornography really, took the exploitation of women to a degree the original pulps would never have dared.

Lesbian thrillers were hugely popular and numbered in their hundreds. And if women weren't engaged in lesbian acts it was only because they were otherwise busy killing, lying, stealing, drugging, drinking or swinging . Much of this was due to the fact that almost exclusively it was men writing for the pulps and the cheap mass market paperbacks. Of course there were some women writers but these were few and far between.


During the Sixties and Seventies, the height of the sexual revolution, it was the age of crude exploitative fictions. Where in the past it had been mystery and murder, with a subtle hint of sex, that had driven the industry it was now very much sex pushed to the forefront bringing everything else with it. And whilst the covers of these books displayed more nudity than the early pulps and paperbacks the artwork was very much in the same style. Some of the writing though was positively pornographic.

"One moment I'd be drawing a dame with a gun in her hand and the next project I'd do the same dame with her tits out.' Steve Bilkins, pulp artist, told Pulp Collector in an interview in 1973.













This was a world away from the 1950's when the Hank Janson books were accused of obscenity.










Ironically these lesbian thrillers, written one handed with young male readers very much in mind, were popular with a large gay female readership.

Stephanie Foote, from the University of Illinois commented on the importance of lesbian pulp novels to the lesbian identity prior to feminism.

"Pulps have been understood as signs of a secret history of readers, and they have been valued because they have been read. The more they are read, the more they are valued, and the more they are read, the closer the relationship between the very act of circulation and reading and the construction of a lesbian community becomes...Characters use the reading of novels as a way to understand that they are not alone."


These days we've moved on both in society and in our reading and women in fiction are much more rounded, real people than they were in the days of the pulps and mass market paperback nasties.


Indeed in the modern world many of the truly great writers are women and the exploitative paperbacks are merely relics of less enlightened times. The pulps live on though and authors like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Paul M. Cain and Mickey Spillane are immortal and the concept of the femme fatale they helped shape is very much a part of the modern psyche. The Hard Case Crime series continues the long tradition of the femme fatale though and she's just as tough as ever.

Western Fiction for today's readers

She's coming - watch out for exclusive news on the Archive later today.

The Archive is proud to bring you news of a new western paperback range - the first title is imminent and all will be revealed later today. It's 3.30 in the morning as I write this, I've just come in from a night in the cab, and I need some sleep. But I couldn't resist tossing a little teaser out there before the big announcement.

". . .the quintessential action-packed western."

THE MOST TACKY TIE IN AWARD GOES TO...

This is the strangest tie-in I've ever come across - it's not based on a TV series or film, well not officially. But the title's Leatherwood, the main character is Cliff Leatherwood. And is the resemblance on the cover to a certain Clint Eastwood a coincidence?

I've not read it, picked it up amongst a pile of secondhand books but it amuses me but the plot, involving a freedom fighter called Benito Juarez makes it sounds as if it's aiming for the feel of the dollar films.










It was published by Powell Books of California in 1970 and is credited to the name Stack Sutton. It was probably a house pen-name. The publisher's address is in Sherman Way, Reseda and there is a list of other western titles inside the book but author names are not specified. There doesn't seem to be a cover price anywhere on the book.

It shows how vibrant the paperback business was in those days - books like this would have probably turned a tidy little profit.






WESTERN RELATED -There's a great interview with Black Horse Writer, John Paxton Sheriff over on Western Fiction review