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.

Pulp in the Blood - Laurie Powers interview

Laurie Powers has a passion for old tatty covers, mouldy smelly paper, sun bleached artwork and words composed by long dead writers. Like an archaeologist, a literary Indiana Jones, rooting about in ancient tombs she excavates the stories of the pulp writers of old, writers who would be forgotten were it not for the efforts of people like herself. She has seen her grandfather's autobiography entitled, Pulp Writer: 20 years in the American Grub Street, through to publication. Purchase details can be found below.

She produces her popular Blog which can be read HERE and regularly gives talks and presentations on the history of the pulp publishing medium. Her interest stems from the fact that in 1999 she discovered that her late grandfather, Paul Powers was a pulp fiction writer with credits in some of the more iconic magazines of the early pulp period.

"That's where it started. I really didn't know much about it at all until I started my research into his (Paul Powers) life. Then the more I looked into it, the more interested I became. I guess what really intrigued me, and still does, are the histories of all of the so-called unknown writers, like my grandfather, who wrote for the pulps, typed out story after story week after week, but never got the acclaim other writers like Dashiell Hammett, F. John Daley, Frederick Faust and others did. What happened to all those writers?"



It was Laurie's determination to find out more about her grandfather that sent her on several avenues of research and thankfully, for us, she has decided to share her findings with the world. I asked Laurie to tell us more about her grandfather.



"My grandfather began his writing career in the early 1920s. The first stories he wrote were actually horror stories that he sold to Weird Tales in 1925. But he needed to make more money than he was making writing for Weird Tales, so he began to write Westerns and sold his first stories to Wild West Weekly in 1928. From 1928 to 1943 he wrote almost exclusively for Wild West Weekly. For those fifteen years, he carried at least four heroes, Sonny Tabor, Kid Wolf, Freckles Malone and Johnny Forty-five. He also wrote King Kolt stories and many many short stores for the magazine. He wrote stories for the first three characters under the pseudonym Ward M. Stevens, the fourth under the name Andrew Griffin.

Both Sonny Tabor stories and Kid Wolf stories were later compiled and turned into books. At least five of his stories were also reprinted as Little Big Books published by the Saalfield Company.

All in all, my grandfather wrote at least 440 stories for Wild West Weekly from 1928 to 1943. During those fifteen years, he and his family moved all over the Southwest, from Kansas to Arizona, to Long Beach, back to Arizona, then New Mexico and back to California. Over those fifteen years, he moved his family at least fifteen times. I guess you could say he was a restless soul.

After Wild West Weekly shut down in 1943, he spent the rest of the 1940s writing for other pulps and also wrote a Western novel, Doc Dillahay, which is loosely based on the life of his father.

I didn't know about my grandfather's career as a pulp fiction writer until 1999. He had died in 1971, and his remaining children had drifted away in the 1960s, so his entire history as a pulp fiction writer was lost until I discovered it again in 1999 while doing research for a college paper. During my research, I was able to track down his daughter - my aunt - and when we reunited in the summer of 1999, she and I went through his personal papers, which had been stored away since his death. In those papers was his memoir about being a pulp fiction writer, Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street. "

The term "PULP FICTION" has often been used in a derogatory fashion, suggesting that the works churned out by these hard working writers of old were somehow sub-standard, writing for the uneducated masses to earn a fast buck but the term actually comes from the old low quality pulp wood paper used to produce the books. These days the Internet has become the home of pulp fiction. I asked Laurie about this.


"It depends on what you mean by 'home.' As far as a center gathering place for people who are interested in pulp fiction, I think it does. It's been a blessing, I think, to many like me who really felt disconnected from other enthusiasts and historians before. I wish I would have known about some of the online groups when I first started out in my research 8 or 9 years ago. They probably were around, but I didn't know about them.

Now, if you mean by "home" a storage archive for the old pulp fiction stories, that's another story. The pulp fiction phenomenon began in the 1890s and was at the height of its popularity in the 1930s. That means that the majority of magazines are now at least 70 years old and they weren't meant to last longer than a few years - at the most - in the first place. And over the years many magazine copies were lost or thrown away, further reducing the number of stories that survive. So using the Internet as an archive for these old stories is good - as long as no copyright laws are being violated. Many of these stories have been in the course of being reprinted and anthologized for many decades now, so I don't think they would ever have been completely lost, even if the Internet hadn't come along. But many of these stories, especially those written by lesser known authors, might never make it into anthologies or reprinted. So the Internet is a place that might be the salvation for many of these stories that would never have made it into anthologies.

But to read a pulp fiction story without the benefit of holding that fragile paper in your hand, without knowing the musty smell, the color of the yellowed paper, the glossy cover, is missing a huge part of the experience. By reading a story within the actual pages of one of the magazines, you can experience what it must have been like to read that story in 1935. It's one of the few mediums I know of where the actual physical format of the magazine - the type of paper, the covers, the nature of its fragility - gets almost as much attention as the stories themselves.

As far as the new pulp fiction that's being produced now, I'm finding a lot of great sites that provide new fiction. Beat to a Pulp is a great example. The only problem is getting the word out to people that these sites exist so they will attract bigger audiences. How these web sites play out in the next few years is a pretty interesting question. But then we're all wondering how the entire publishing industry will fare in the next few years."


To the modern eye the life of the pulp writer of old is very romanticised - we imagine these men and women hunched over archaic typewriters, bottle of scotch on the desk, cigarette burning in the ash-tray while they produce their quota of words for the day. I wonder what life must have been like for these writers?


"I don't want to make any generalizations, but I think it's probably safe to say that it was pretty much what it's like now for many writers: Isolating. Hard. Requiring a lot of discipline and guts. Of course they didn't have the luxury of computers and didn't have the luxury of being able to go back and edit like we can now. But then, they didn't have time to edit back then! They were paid by the word, most of the time pretty cheaply, like a penny a word. So that meant that in order to make a decent living, they really had to pound out thousands of words every week, week in and week out. Get the story down, put it in the envelope, mail it off to New York, and start on the next one - pronto. There was no time for lolly-gagging around and revising and rewriting, so the modern day computer amenities would have been lost on them. I never would have made it as a pulp writer. I would have starved after the first story.

Burn-out was another issue, because of the sheer number of stories you had to write, and the strict plot lines and formulaic nature of many of the pulp stories. At least I know it was for my grandfather. He started writing the Sonny Tabor and Kid Wolf stories in 1929; by 1933, he was already pretty darn tired of writing these 12,000 word stories every six weeks for these characters, and most of them had to follow a prescriptive set of rules. But he had to make each one sound pretty damn original. So it was no surprise that by 1933, 1934, he was starting to stall in getting his stories in. The editors continually had to send him letters asking for the stories and admonishing him because he was late. And he had another 10 years to go. Good thing he didn't know that at the time.

I know the isolation must have been hard - pulp writers were spread out over the entire country, some of them living abroad, too. I know there were some communities of writers around, but they were probably in the minority. I know my grandfather had to deal with the loneliness - he doesn't talk about it too much in the memoir, but it's underneath the surface.

He did complain - a lot - about how little respect pulp writers got. Many people who didn't understand the discipline or the training necessary to write these stories - and yes, it took some training - dismissed these writers as hacks. It got to the point that he would end up lying when people would ask him what he did for a living. I guess the money they made, which could be significant, was a consolation. "


So, excluding her grandfather, what pulp writers does Laurie particularly like?

"For Westerns, I love Walt Coburn. Chuck Martin, who never got much attention, is another favorite. I have some letters from him that he wrote to my grandfather. He wrote letters that made you think that he was living the cowboy dream, living large. Maybe that's why I'm fond of his stories.

For other genres, quite frankly I never had a chance to read a whole lot of crime or detective stories for a long time because I was so busy reading and studying Westerns. Of course I've always liked Raymond Chandler's stories, but now I'm investigating Frank Gruber. I read Gruber's memoir The Pulp Jungle several years ago, and it's fun now to read his stories."

Laurie gives presentations at libraries to promote her book about her grandfather as well as the history of pulp writing in general. I ask her to tell us how these presentations work?

"I have to say that they have been one of the most important part of my marketing Pulp Writer. I started making library presentations because I was so frustrated that I couldn't get anywhere with book stores and getting them to let me come in for book signings. They want you to have a following in order to have a book signing at their stores; but if you're a new writer like me who has no following, how are you supposed to get one without doing book signings? I also realized that I wasn't really interested in just sitting at a table and signing; I wanted to talk about this subject. I felt, and still feel, that there is so much misinformation out there and a lack of knowledge about pulp fiction that I wanted to give lectures about it. I felt that I knew enough to give a general overview of the topic. Most of the public nowadays knows so little about the subject that even what I give them in an hour, which is barely touching the surface, is more than they knew before.

So I took a few weeks and created a power point presentation and then started calling libraries - both locally and out of state in places like Arizona and New Mexico - to see if they would be interested in me coming and giving a presentation about Pulp Writer and a general overview of the history of pulp fiction. Their reaction was the exact opposite of the reaction I received from book store owners. About 90 percent of them asked: how soon can you come?

I don't charge anything; most libraries don't have much money anyway. I just ask if I can sell copies of Pulp Writer afterwards. Some libraries will give me an honorarium of maybe $100 or so, which last year would have barely covered my gas. But it's okay, because I have really come to love doing these.

A week before the presentation, the library will put in an announcement in the local paper of the presentation, which is great, because sometimes that's more publicity than a book writer would normally get. I also sent out a mess of press releases when the book came out, and that also generated some articles about Pulp Writer. I worked it out with the reporters to publish the articles just before the library presentations. That really helped raise the number of people that would turn out.

The turn-out numbers vary. It can be as few as 10 people or as many as 40 or 50. The most has been 70. The majority of people know little about the subject, but once in a while collectors or other historians will show. It's great having them, because they will offer information and their own stories during the presentation. The presentation is about an hour. I talk about how I found out about my grandfather's career, and then give a very basic overview of the history of pulp fiction magazines. With an hour, which is as much as people can last and without me losing my voice, I can give them the basics without getting into too much trouble.

I love doing these, and it's a good thing, because it has not been a great venue for selling copies of the book. People don't come to libraries to buy books, so they aren't as motivated to open their wallets, I guess. Or maybe it's because I'm a lousy salesperson. But I've met a lot of great people, some of whom have turned into either friends or valuable contacts, and giving the lectures keeps my skills sharp."



Lately there have been some great pulp collections hitting the book shops. I ask Laurie if there are any she particularly likes?



"It seems that most of the anthologies focus on one genre. Back in 1970, Tony Goodstone put out The Pulps, an anthology that covered several genres. Right now, I think the most famous one is the Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Ott Penzler, that is a collection of crime and noir. Delicious!

But I jump around. Right now I've got a Famous Fantastic Mysteries anthology on my table, a Shadow of the Lariat anthology, a Weird Tales collection that came out in 1997, and the Black Lizard book. So depending on my mood, a good story is only an arm's reach away. I would love to get my hands on anthologies of some of the more obscure genres, like the Sea Stories or Jungle Stories or the Battle Aces stories. "

So Laurie tell us about your own writing?

"You mean I have to keep writing? I thought I was done. I am the best procrastinator in the world, although I know some writers out there will beg to differ with me, so it seems that I have been spending most of my time lately writing on my blog.

I found out from writing the prologue and epilogue of Pulp Writer that I love to write about historical subjects. But I am struggling right now with what my next project is. I'm restless; I want to write something, to get my hands on something that will swallow me up for a few years, but I just don't know what it is. "



And finally to end the interview I ask Laurie for her desert island western?



"I have to say that it would be a more modern Western: Lonesome Dove. I have never been so upset to see a book end. I normally don't read a book more than once, but I know I could read that one again and again. Films are tougher to pick. I would like to say The Ox-Bow Incident, but it's also pretty depressing and I'd probably kill myself if that was the only movie I could watch. I'd say Red River. "


The Tainted Archive thanks Laurie for her time and all her efforts to bring the works of her late grandfather and writers like him to a modern audience and ensuring these works are saved for the future. Our gratitude is with you.

Pulp Writer: 20 years in the American Grub Street can be bought HERE.


This interview is dedicated to the memory of Paul Powers, pulp writer.

BEAT TO A PULP NEW STORY

Head on over to Beat to a Pulp for this week's short story

This one's called Identity Theft

online fiction alert

I've a rather nasty little noir piece HERE

leave a comment on the story, let me know what you think.

Feedback on fiction is always nice.

BEAT TO A PULP - CREATOR INTERVIEW

I have no doubt that the next generation of big name writers are going to come from the internet. It's happening with music - British group The Artic Monkeys secured a number one song via internet downloads before they even had a record contract.

Novels are published on the net, some have even gone from the screen into conventional print.

So where does this new writing talent start out? Where do they learn their craft?

Webzines, online magazines, are publishing new talent all the time.

One of the better webzines around at the moment is Beat to a Pulp run by writers David Cramer and Elaine Ash.

And so I sat down with the duo to find out what it is they are hoping to achive with their webzine. Why for instance, given that there are so many webzines out there did they decide to start a new one?

"Elaine: I had been working with David in an editor/writer relationship for about a year, on his own short stories, so we knew each other but had never actually met face to face. David ran a successful news blog for several years. Every now and then he would mention starting up a short story site and collecting submissions from writers all over the world, and I thought it was a terrible idea. I told him it would divert his attention from his own writing and he’d run the risk of getting bogged down with the workload, blah blah. Then DZ Allen’s Muzzle Flash closed down, and a few others, at the same time. Online venues were shrinking for short stories, so when David announced that he was really serious about starting a site, I revisited my opinion and came onboard as Editor at Large"

"David: I couldn’t have said it any better!"

And it's been a success - I point out that I strongly believe the next superstar scribe is going to come from the internet. So what do David and Elaine look for in a story?

"Elaine: I think e-zine publishing is a terrific way for unknown writers to establish themselves and for known writers to reach new readers. It’s truly been a renaissance for the short story. Everything old is new again as the saying goes. I eat, sleep and breathe discovering new writers and working with them. It’s hugely satisfying and exciting for me. Then, when comments start coming in, and you can tell when readers are truly jazzed about a piece, it’s a reward all in itself."

"David: Our primary focus is hardboiled crime but we welcome action/adventure, western, sci-fi, fantasy, horror and thrillers. We pass on bigotry and overt political agendas. Elaine looks for an exciting start to a story, the plot kick-off. I’m more patient with a slow start if the story gradually draws me in and ends with a bang."

But would there every be a subject they would turn down?

"

David: We judge each story on its own merit but we’re not interested in publishing overt political pieces or anything that encourages racism. Extreme violence and sex are fine as long it’s central to the story and not just a gratuitous scene."

Both David and Elaine are writers themselves. Will they be publishing any of their own work on Beat to a Pulp?

"Elaine: Yes. "

"David: Yes, I have a story coming up that will be published later in the year. "

And where do they see the webzine being in a year's time.

"Elaine: I just want the quality to stay as consistently good as it is now. I keep saying to David, that’s all we have to do. Just show the world that we can do this week after week, and attract a loyal readership"

Well the policy seems to be paying off big time and I, among many others, make it a part of our online week to read the new story on Beat to a Pulp. I wonder what writers influence David and Elaine's work?

"Elaine: James M. Cain, Thomas Harris, Stephen King, Tom Robbins, Jim Thompson, Janet Fitch, John Barth, John Burdett, Terry Pratchett, just to name a few. Please don’t recoil in horror if your favorite writer isn’t listed here. I could fill an entire page with writers I hugely love and admire."

"David: Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie and Stephen King are some of my influences. Recently I’ve started writing a western and I’ve turned to the work of Luke Short, Louis L’Amour and the Longarm novels written by James Reasoner for inspiration."

Is there a backlog of stories waiting to be read?

"David: So far, I’m staying on top of the heap.

So generally how long would a writer wait for a decision when sending a story?

"Elaine: Thirty days, max."

"David: We try to reply within a couple of weeks so authors aren’t waiting too long, but as Elaine says, no more than a month."

So far the zine has published crime and westerns albeit with a slant. In fact one or two of the stories published thus far are hard to catagorise. Are there any other genres lined up? Horror, SF perhaps?

"Elaine: Yes, but not enough in my opinion. One of our goals is to reach out to horror and sci-fi writers, and extend a warm welcome for their submissions. Good writing and good stories can appeal to readers in any genre. BTAP is a great place to get a story read by a fresh readership that might not surf over to a horror site, but will read and enjoy a horror story with gusto on BTAP."

"David: I’ll just add that we have a very eerie horror offering from Chris F. Holm whose work has been featured in Ellery Queen, plus a dark fantasy from Canadian author Barbara Martin."

And finally are there ever times when David and Elaine disagree on a story?

"Elaine: Yes. Vehemently. David is the perfect publisher for me because he remains calm while I passionately argue my case. I took my graduate degree in story critique at Hollywood Screw U, and learned to defend plot points in a series writers’ room. Not for the faint of heart. In Hollywood, it’s just accepted that passionate disagreement and creative negotiation can yield great work. A Hollywood writer that I’ve argued the most with, is one I love and respect tremendously, and we would jump at the chance to work together again. There are never hard feelings about a little creative skirmish. The one who cares the most wins."

"David: Ha! Elaine’s answer cracks me up, though it’s not far from the truth. I come from the O. Henry school of writing and I’m really big on the twist endings. So, occasionally we may differ. For Elaine, as long as the ride in getting to the end is thrilling, the end doesn’t need to tip her out of her seat."

Nuff said

Beat to a pulp

David Cramer

Elaine Ash

Next interview western writer PATRICIA GOTT

HAMMER, SPILLANE AND COLLINS -An hardboiled interview

Chandler loathed the brutal no nonsense Mike Hammer, seeing him as a sadistic version of his knight errant Marlowe and critics were no kinder and would draw attention to the violence and red baiting of Mickey Spillane's pugilistic gumshoe. In fact the books were often sneered upon and treated almost as pornography but that didn't stop them selling like hot cakes.

Course these days things are different and Hammer is seen as a quintessential part of the genre, as important as Marlowe and Sam Spade in the growth of the genre as it stands today.

Course the fact that Spillane was the best selling mystery writer of the last century may have had a lot to do with the criticism - critics love to shoot down a success story.

For many years one voice spoke louder than most at extolling the virtues of Mickey and Mike Hammer and that was the tones of Road to Perdition author, Max Allan Collins.

Max had always been a fan and wrote scores of letters to the author and years later when he met his hero, Spillane remembered the letters and remarked that they used to write. Max then replied - "Sure a hundred letters from me and one from you."

Spillane laughed at that and a friendship, built on mutual respect and in many ways a meeting of minds, was formed. When Spillane passed away in 2006 he had already placed his legacy in safe hands, by handing Max a pile of unfinished manuscripts, notes and such.

I wondered what it was about Spillane that had appealed to the young Max ?

"I began reading Mickey at an early age -- thirteen -- and I'm sure the exciting, superficial aspects of his work, the sex and violence, were key. I'd gotten interested in private eye fiction thanks to a spate of TV shows in the late '50s and early '60s, PETER GUNN, 77 SUNSET STRIP, PERRY MASON and the original MIKE HAMMER with Darren McGavin. I started reading novels by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but was always attracted by the dramatic covers of the Hammer paperbacks on the book racks. Of course, these had a reputation as "dirty books," so for a while I didn't dare buy one. In fact, the first time I bought a Mike Hammer paperback, I was out of town, on vacation with my parents...and lied about my age.

What has kept me a Spillane fan all these years is much more than the sex and violence -- the former seems tame by contemporary standards, although frankly the violence is as potent as ever -- those early books still shock in that regard. What Mickey had, particularly in the first seven novels, was a vivid, expressionistic style, a noir poetry, that combined with his compelling first-person portrait of Hammer presented something unique in the genre. Even Mickey's critics, and they've been legion, have credited him with incredible narrative drive. He probably wrote the best beginnings and endings of any popular writer."

So to go from fan to friend - how did this work out?

"It grew out of my becoming a defender of his work. In the 1950s, Spillane was blamed for the decline of literature and the rise of juvenile delinquency, among other absurdities. As a kid, I'd been shocked to find out that Mickey did not share the generally favorable critical appraisal that Hammett and Chandler routinely received, and I wrote any number of reviews and articles, singing his praises. I began publishing my own novels in 1973, and I sent the first two to Mickey, who responded with a warm letter, welcoming me to the profession.

In 1981, the big mystery fan convention, Bouchercon -- named for New York Times critic Anthony Boucher, who had often attacked Spillane -- was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee is the home of Miller Beer, and Mickey was at the time in the midst of a big TV commercial campaign as a spokesperson for Miller Lite -- these were clever commercial spots with Mickey essentially playing Mike Hammer in trenchcoat and fedora. The Bouchercon people wanted to have Mickey as a guest of honor and worked through Miller Beer to make that happen. And I was recruited, as the "Mickey Spillane guy," to be the con's liaison with Mick. We did a two-man interview that was hugely attended, as Mickey had never appeared at a Bouchercon or any kind of fan event before.

Anyway, he and I hit it off, and he invited me to visit him at his South Carolina home on the oceanfront -- actually, an inlet off the ocean. The first visit was in 1982, I believe, the first of many. Most of Mickey's friends were local people with no connection to writing -- from car mechanics to dentists -- and I represented somebody he could talk to about the craft and profession of fiction-writing."

Max Allan Collins is a successful writer - he was responsible for the original graphic novel which became the movie Road to Perdition which is probably still his best known work. But he's produced scores of graphic novels and novels including the successful Nate Heller and Quarry series. He's responsible for many CSI novel tie-ins and recently his tie-in novel for American Gangster sat on the New York Times Bestseller lists and that's not to mention film production.

Oh and he did the Dick Tracy comic strip for a great number of years.

He also seems to have won at one time or other every award the genre can bestow. But for all this success being handed the manuscripts of Mickey's unfinished works must have been daunting.

"It's a huge sense of responsibility, but I am not intimidated. I have unwittingly trained for this moment my entire professional career and before that. I'd done a number of projects with Mickey -- we co-edited numerous anthologies and did a comic book together that ran several years -- so his belief in me, while incredibly gratifying, was no surprise. The real sense of responsibility divides in two -- first, handling these works in a way that I think would please and satisfy Mickey; and second, creating something that will resonate with contemporary readers, so that the books will be successful enough that all of them can be done. In particular, there were six substantial Hammer novel manuscripts, of which GOLIATH BONE is the first, and my minimum goal here is to get all six out there on book shelves. Imagine if Agatha Christie had left behind substantial portions of half a dozen Poirot and/or Marple novels -- with a writer of that stature, you don't just leave them in the file or a trunk. "

So far the Spillane/Collins partnership has resulted in Dead Street from Hardcase crime and a new Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone. So what comes next?

"I have completed the second novel, THE BIG BANG, which is set in the mid-1960s, when Mickey began it. The idea is to set each book in the period Mickey conceived it. The third book will probably be KISS HER GOODBYE, a novel Mickey worked on in the '80s. If we're lucky enough to get a second three-book contract, what will follow will be COMPLEX 90, another mid-'60s story and a sequel to Mickey's THE GIRL HUNTERS, having to do with Russian spies; then LADY, GO DIE, which is a particularly exciting project, because it's a manuscript Mickey started in 1948 as the second Hammer novel, right after I, THE JURY; and finally KING OF THE WEEDS, the novel Mickey had originally intended to be the last Hammer novel, until he put it aside to write the post 9/11 novel, GOLIATH BONE.

After that, if readers want more, there are another half dozen smaller fragments -- a chapter or two with notes, in most cases -- from which I could develop Hammer novels. But the six I've mentioned are all substantial manuscripts -- 100 pages or more, often with notes, sometimes with roughed-out final scenes. Mickey often worked out the ending first."

The Goliath Bone, see my review on the Tainted Archive, was a welcome return for the hard as nails private eye and also gave us a happy ending to the on off Hammer/Velda relationship. How much of the book was completed when Collins received the manuscript?

"Mickey had done ten of twelve chapters, plus about half of the last chapter. But he knew he was working against the clock, ill as he was, and these were rough-draft for the most part, shorter than his usual chapters. So my job was fleshing things out in an unobtrusive way. There isn't a chapter that doesn't have Spillane material in it. This was possible because I also found a three-chapter false start in his papers, which allowed me to work some of that material in, as well."

The Mike Hammer books were often accused of being too right wing and the new book doesn't shy away from the odd political comment. Was Max worried about this in today's inane world where political correctness is censoring the language and destroying individualism?

"My politics are not Mickey's politics, but my responsibility was to honor his views, and I did. The Mike Hammer character was a classic outsider, always depicted by Mickey as a guy with friends of various ethnicity's -- he fought for the little guy, remember. There are some racist comments about Muslims in the book, but they come from the mouths of characters other than Hammer himself, our hero. He does make an outrageous statement late in the book, to a dying terrorist, and that's pure Mickey."

I wonder what it was like to have Mickey Spillane as a friend - I've seen video footage of him and he seems, what we would call in the UK - quite a character. What was he like?

"He was quite a character by American standards as well. He was a very unpretentious guy, warm and funny -- my wife often characterized him as a scamp, because he liked to tease and shock. But what a sweetheart -- generous and down to earth, and probably the most gracious celebrity you'd ever meet. He always had time for, as he put it, his "customers."

He would put himself down and laugh about the bad critical reception -- he called himself a "writer," not an "author," said he was "the chewing gum of modern literature." But that was a defense mechanism. Privately, he and I spoke about the art and craft of writing, and his love for language, his enthusiasm for sheer storytelling, was at the center of his being."

Eventually Collins will exhaust the unpublished Spillane material. Are there plans to continue Mike Hammer then as original works?

"There are so many fragments that there were never be a need for me to create a brand-new Hammer story. Anything I do will have a basis in something Mickey started to develop. Beyond the first six "new" novels, another six or seven are possible, as well as potentially four or five short stories -- I've already done one short story. Chronologically, GOLIATH BONE is the last novel. All the rest will be set in period, based upon when Mickey conceived them.

Beyond this, there are a number of non-Hammer novels, including a half-completed sequel to THE DELTA FACTOR, and a completed novella called THE LAST STAND. Lots of interesting things. But since Mike Hammer is, as Mickey put it, his "bread and butter character," the emphasis at first will be on Hammer."


Mickey Spillane was never considered in the top rank among the likes of Chandler and Hammett but in pacing, I think he was superior to both. I wondered what Max's thoughts on this were?

"The shocking content of the early books turned critics and social commentators against him. Mickey is the guy who opened the door on sex and violence in popular fiction -- it all flows from him, including and in particular James Bond and Ian Fleming. In America, the right wing attacked Mickey for what was then shocking sexuality; and the left wing were deeply offended by his hero's violent vigilante tactics. Spillane got it from all sides.

In addition, he wrote in an expressionistic pulp style, very vivid and even over the top, and this was a stark, even startling contrast to the understatement of Hammett and the literary tone of Chandler. To this day, it amuses me that so many critics will lavish praise on the brigade of slavish Chandler imitators, but many still refuse to recognize the distinct genius of Spillane at his best."

So which of Mickey's books would rate as Max's favourite?

"The first I read, at 13: ONE LONELY NIGHT. Mike Hammer takes on the "Commies" even as he attempts to recover from the criticism of a judge who attacked him from the bench in a manner that clearly was meant to invoke the critical attacks on Spillane."

A few years ago Max made a documentary about Mickey Spillane which I've never seen. I ask him about this?

"Mickey would never allow me to write his biography, saying he might write an autobiography himself one day. But he consented to take part in a documentary, because he understood the publicity value. I interviewed him at length, and also sat down with dozens of mystery writers at a Bouchercon to get their take -- people like the late Donald E. Westlake participated, and Sara Paretsky, Walter Mosley, Lawrence Block. London's own Maxium Jakubowski is in it. Anyway, it won quite a few awards at festivals, and has been shown at the NFT in London as part of a Spillane film retrospective mounted by my friend Adrian Wootten.

It's available in America as part of a film called SHADES OF NOIR, which gathers several short films of mine with the documentary, MIKE HAMMER'S MICKEY SPILLANE, as the centerpiece. Right now that compilation is only available as part of the boxed set ThE BLACK BOX, which gathers three other indie features I wrote and directed. Incidentally, Mickey plays an attorney in two of them, MOMMY and its sequel MOMMY'S DAY."

This interview is published in the memory of Frank Morrison Spillane 1918 - 2006






Next interview - David Cramer and Elain Ash tells us what it is they look for when selecting stories for thier Beat to a Pulp webzine. FRAfrank Morrison Spillane

hard case crime - creator interview.

Charles Ardai and business partner Max Phillips, were dismayed at the lack of slim pacey paperbacks in the shops - the kinds of book they picked up on the second hand stalls and both shared a deep love for, the pulps from writers like Mickey Spillane and Richard Stark. And so they decided to start up their own publishing imprint which would print original works written in the style of the pulps and classic long out of print titles.

Given the modern day market, where huge building brick like tomes are in vogue and slim, cheap, paperbacks are yesterday's product this must have seemed a risky, maybe even insane, business idea.

"Risky commercially, perhaps -- but commercial success was never our main concern. I mean, of course we wanted the line to succeed and prosper. Who wouldn't? But first we wanted it to be good, and to be good at what we wanted it to be good at. We didn't start by asking the question "How can we make some money publishing books?" and come up with the answer "Publishing old-fashioned crime novels might work"; we started by asking the question "Wouldn't it be great if someone started publishing old-fashioned crime novels again?" And you know what? If we'd published a handful and it had turned out that there was no market for them, we'd have stopped and been satisfied with the handful we'd done, content to have done something we cared about and done it well. Not every business venture has to succeed -- indeed, only a very small percentage ever do. But what happened instead was that the first handful of books did very well. They didn't sell at (or anywhere near) best-seller levels, but they sold well enough; and in terms of critical esteem and attention, they soared. People loved them. Newspapers and magazines raved about them. Every single original novel we published in our first year was nominated for either the Shamus Award, the Edgar Award, or both -- and we won one of each. So...we published another handful. And those did well, too, although not quite as well in terms of sales, the novelty having worn off a little. At which point we were lucky enough to get to publish a new novel by Stephen King, his first since announcing what he'd described as his retirement from writing fiction. And that one did sell at best-seller levels -- we put out more than one million copies. Nothing we've done since has been comparable in terms of commercial success, but the line has survived and we're very proud of it. Did we know when we started that it would still be around five years later? That we'd wind up publishing not a handful of books but fifty, sixty, more? No. What we knew was that we'd be publishing books we loved, and we hoped at least some other people might like them too. That was enough."

The passion seemed to pay off and far from the originally hopes for half a dozen titles the imprint recently published their 50th title - Fifty to One written by Ardai himself and something of a departure for the imprint - it's still hardboiled crime but a comedy also with each chapter named after an hard case title and in sequence too, with the story cleverly invented around these titles.

Not an easy task but then Charles Ardai was up to it having already published hardboiled fiction under his pen-name, Richard Aleas. And far from mere vanity projects these books, published by Hard Case Crime, have gained massive critical and fan approval. The detective John Blake, named after the romantic poet, is the kind of noble everyman character Chandler would have approved of.

Hard Case crime continues to be a success but if the company folded tomorrow, not that this is likely given the current crop of excellent titles, then the name Hard Case Crime is secured in the history of pulp fiction. It'll be mentioned alongside such pulp pushers as Gold Medal and popular library.

"I like to think that we have reminded people about certain types of storytelling, and ways of presenting books visually, that had largely been forgotten. Book covers had become so boring -- large type, minimal illustration, nothing like the gorgeous, sexy painted covers of the early days of paperbacks. And books had become so thick -- 350 pages, 400 pages, 500. Where were the lean stories of the 1950s, the ones that hooked you on page one with a dead body or a man on the run or a naked woman getting out of the shower (or all three) and then hauled you bodily through the rest of the plot in five- or six-page chunks, ending finally with a breathless, heart-stopping finale on page 176 or 192 (or, sometimes, 144 or 128)? Where were the covers that made you respond with almost Pavlovian intensity, with a quickening of your pulse and a stirring in your groin? Sure, some of them were ridiculous -- some were even offensive -- but tell the truth: could you stop yourself from peeking at them? Could you walk away if you had coins enough in your pocket to buy them? These were books. These were vehicles for popular entertainment every bit as compelling and exciting as today the latest hot videogame or TV show or movie is. They sold more than a hundred thousand copies per book, not sometimes, not once in a while, but every single time -- every time, every one, over and over again, month in and month out, for two decades. This was the stuff the masses consumed for pleasure. That's why the format grew to be known as the 'mass-market' paperback. This was how ordinary Joes got their first exposure to literature -- to Shakespeare and Mary Shelley, to Poe, to Orwell, to Pearl Buck and James Hilton and William Faulkner. And it was how they got their weekly diet of mayhem and titillation, of action and suspense, of sexy repartee and comic mischance. They had radio, they had film, eventually they had television, but through it all they also read books, and the reason they read books -- one of the reasons -- was that the books were readable, intensely, irresistibly so.

I like to think maybe more people remember this tradition and appreciate just how rich a tradition it was because of our efforts to revive it. I like to think we haven't only been preaching to the choir -- that we've led at least some people who'd otherwise never have tried a book like this to give one a shot. And I hope we've done something to prevent some awfully good writers -- not geniuses but journeymen of exceptional skill and passion, with so much to offer readers -- from being utterly forgotten."


Mission accomplished then - but given the current financial situation how healthy does he see the book trade remaining over the coming months?


"Not very. When the chief executive of Barnes & Noble announces in advance of the Christmas season that the season will be "horrible," the worst in his entire career as a bookseller; when major publishers conduct layoffs and freeze acquisitions, however briefly; when bookstores go out of business left and right...you know you're in serious trouble. Make no mistake: The book business is in serious trouble. It's never been much of a business in economic terms -- if you wanted to make good money, you'd be better off trading stocks or selling widgets or laying bricks. So when there's a downturn in the publishing business it's not a turn from ludicrously profitable to slightly less so; it's a turn from lousy to can't survive. I wouldn't be surprised to see some publishers go under and others consolidate. No guarantee that we'll still be around a year or two from now. But you can't worry about that. You just have to keep plugging along, putting out the best books you can, as long as you can."

Hard Case Crime then has succeeded where others have failed so what advise would Charles give to prospective hardboiled scribblers out there?

"

Well, write a good book. That's number one, and you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) how many people fail to follow that simple piece of advice. Of course, it's not their fault -- writing a good book isn't easy and most people just can't do it. Desire is not the same thing as talent, enthusiasm isn't always matched by ability, and there are more people in the world who can put pen to paper than there are writers. So my second piece of advice to writers is the old Socratic saw, Know Thyself. I get submissions from people who think they've written THE MALTESE FALCON, if not the Bible, and it's just obviously unpublishable, to such an extreme extent that no objective reader could possibly reach a different conclusion. Know thyself. Look at what you're writing, compare it to the books you enjoy reading, and ask whether it's comparable. If you can't tell, ask a friend to do this comparison, one who's willing to be honest with you. And if the answer is no, if your writing isn't at a comparable level of quality, don't submit it to a publisher. Sit down and write something else, something better. And until your work is at that level, keep working at your craft. You don't open a French restaurant if the best meal you can cook is some inedible caricature of coq au vin; don't bring the equivalent in novel terms to a publisher.

What if you have written a good book? Well, the next hurdle if to figure out whether it's the particular sort of good book we publish. Does your book have ghosts in it? Vampires? The undead? Well, we don't publish supernatural or fantasy novels, so we'd be the wrong publisher to send it to. Sometimes it's subtler: We don't publish a lot of comedies, especially not broad ones or ones that spoof the genre. We very rarely publish political novels. We tend to go for something more classically hardboiled or noir rather than the more modern sort of Hollywood-inflected 'thriller' about clever-monickered serial killers playing cat-and-mouse games with the police. How can you find out what sort of book we publish? It's simple: Read our books. If you don't want to pony up the seven or eight bucks apiece it would cost to buy them, you can find sample chapters from all of them for free on our Web site, www.hardcasecrime.com. Read what we publish, learn what we like -- and then submit a book to us if yours is similar. And good. It's got to be good.

And even then, don't be surprised -- or discouraged -- if we say no. We get more than 1,000 submissions per year and can only buy 4 or 5 original novels. That means we have to say no to more than 99% of the books we see, including some that are very good. Even if yours is good, the odds are less than 1 in 10 that we'll buy it. But that doesn't mean some other publisher won't, and they might even pay you more for it than we could. (Almost anyone can pay more than we can.)"

The Hard Case Crime series never fails to delight - it wopuld be nice if some other publishers would come along and do a similar thing for other pulp genres - westerns, horror etc. Does Charles ever see Hard Case doing this?

"

Well, we are branching out into pulp adventure fiction next year: In May we'll publish HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY, the first in a series of novels about a two-fisted modern-day adventurer named Gabriel Hunt, and additional volumes will follow every few months after that. The books will be published under Gabriel Hunt's name, but will actually be written by some old Hard Case Crime hands (me, David J. Schow, Christa Faust) as well as some friends of the family (James Reasoner, Nick Kaufmann, Raymond Benson). The books are intended to harken back to the style of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sax Rohmer, or Doc Savage and The Avenger, or Indiana Jones. They're a ton of fun to write and edit, and again, it's a type of book you just don't see being published anymore -- inexplicably so, when you consider just how popular the genre is at the movies.

Will we ever experiment with other genres? It's hard to say. There are only so many hours in the day, and Hard Case Crime has zero full-time employees -- it's just me, working on it part-time, and a handful of freelancers working as hard as they possibly can. But who knows? If we find another genre we have a real passion for, we might give it a try.

Richard's own writing is very much in the hardboiled school - I wonder who his influences were in the first place as relating to his own output? I meantion that I very much enjoyed his debut novel, Little Girl Lost.

"

Thanks -- I'm glad you liked it. When I reread it, of course, I spot all the flaws: I should have done this, I should have done that. But it was a first novel. It had all of a first novel's flaws, but also, I hope, a first novel's virtues. I am very pleased it was so well received and that readers continue to discover and enjoy it. (The sequel, SONGS OF INNOCENCE, is a better book, but also darker; I could imagine some readers enjoying the first one more.)

Influences? Lawrence Block, definitely: I've read every book the man wrote and I treasure them; he writes about pain and corruption, and about New York City, in ways that really stay with you, and I've tried to emulate that. Also Ross Macdonald, who was the master of the 'little girl lost' story, where the detective goes digging to find out the sad history behind some young woman's tragic end. One reviewer compared my book to Fredric Brown's Ed and Am Hunter novels, and I admit I do love the first of those, THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT. I suppose there's a little of Chandler in there -- no one can write about a weary, disillusioned private eye walking the mean streets without Chandler's shade rearing up. Those are some influences. But there's also some Thomas Hardy in there, a bit of Bernard Malamud, a bit of Paul Auster. Having read a lot of authors, I'm bound to have been influenced by a lot."

So what have Hard Case got lined up for 2009?

"We just put out a long-lost novel by Lawrence Block -- KILLING CASTRO -- which has never before appeared under his real name, and in fact hasn't appeared in any form for nearly half a century. Even die-hard fans of Block didn't know about this novel, so it's a real find. Next month will be an even bigger one: a never-before-published crime novel called THE DEAD MAN'S BROTHER by the acclaimed science fiction writer Roger Zelazny, who wrote it in 1971 but never published it; after his death, it was found by his son, who is a fan of our books, and he brought it to our attention. It's an excellent, excellent book, a real buried treasure.

After that we have Donald Westlake's Edgar-nominated first novel, appearing for the first time ever under the title he originally meant for it to have: THE CUTIE. Then a novel called HOUSE DICK, about skullduggery in a Washington, D.C. hotel, penned by convicted Watergate mastermind E. Howard Hunt. The following month is Peter Blauner's outstanding and underappreciated Atlantic City mob/boxing novel, CASINO MOON, featuring a truly stunning cover by a painter who is himself a former Golden Gloves boxer, Ricky Mujica. Next comes Jason Starr's FAKE I.D., which has never been published in America (there were some European editions).

Then we have PASSPORT TO PERIL, a tale of post-WWII intrigue by Robert B. Parker -- but not the Robert B. Parker who writes the Spenser books. This Robert B. Parker died in 1955 after a career as a war correspondent and (clandestinely) as an agent for the OSS, and here he's writing about an American on the run from Germans and Russians in postwar Budapest.

August brings us back to our roots, with a revival of the work of the old-time pulp writer Peter Rabe -- his memorable first novel, STOP THIS MAN!, about a loser who steals a radioactive bar of gold and then has to deal with the consequences. September is a brand new novel by Russell Atwood, who won praise for his first novel, EAST OF A, ten years ago. It's taken him this wrong to write the second adventure of his detective, LOSERS LIVE LONGER, but it was worth the wait. Our October title will be a never-before-published crime novel called HONEY IN HIS MOUTH by Lester Dent, the creator of pulp hero Doc Savage. November will be the latest installment in Max Allan Collins' very popular 'Quarry' series about a ruthless hitman, QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE. (It's a sequel to THE LAST QUARRY and THE FIRST QUARRY.) And December will feature two books: a new novel set in the world of burlesque and striptease by an author who is himself the head of a celebrated modern burlesque troupe (and featuring two gorgeous members of the troupe modeling for the cover), plus a very special reprint of what I think is one of the greatest hardboiled crime novels of all time...but is rarely, if ever, recognized as such. We're not giving the surprise away yet, but I think people will get a real kick out of it when they see it."

No amount of prodding will loosen Richard's lips but the thought is enticing. After all, now that Hard Case has fifty plus titles under it's belt he must know the business. For instance, I ask him, if the reprints sell more than the original stuff.

"Our bestselling author is Stephen King, hands down; that shouldn't surprise anyone. After King, our bestsellers include folks like Lawrence Block and Ed McBain and Donald Westlake -- again, this shouldn't surprise anyone. But it's not necessarily the case that reprints are more popular for us than originals. It's true that our books by Block and Westlake are reprints -- but I have no doubt that if one of those men wrote an original for us it would sell just as well, if not better. And of course the King book was an original. And some of our other originals have done well -- Mickey Spillane's DEAD STREET, for instance. The issue is not so much whether a book is an original or a reprint, it's how well known the author is. Or more precisely how much interest the public has in a given book, which is highly correlated with how well known the author is, but once in a while a less-well-known author commands the public's attention and his or her book does very nicely for us. This happened with my own second novel, SONGS OF INNOCENCE, for instance, after the Washington Post called it "an instant classic" and NPR aired a half-hour interview with me about it. My name is not well known -- certainly my pseudonym isn't. But the book did well because lots of people heard about it and were made curious enough to buy it. Absent that sort of publicity surge, though, the pre-existing interest people have in the work of their favorite authors is the best predictor of good sales. Reprints by authors from the pulp days whom no one remembers will do less well than new novels by popular writers like Max Allan Collins or Ken Bruen and Jason Starr."

So there we have it HARD CASE CRIME
Publishing the book the way they used to.
No shit - told with the velocity of a spinning bullet.


Thanks to Charles Ardai for answering my questions over the festive period. Here's to a particularly hard case filled 2009.