Sexton Blake on the HP trail

 

Sexton Blake and the secondhand books incident

I picked up this old pulp, one of the Sexton Blake Library, largely because the title amused me. I found the book in Cardiff's excellent Troutmark Books which is situated in the Castle Arcade. The character of Sexton Blake of course came about in 1893 in the Halfpenny Marvel paper. The character owed much to Sherlock Holmes - in fact he's  been called the poor man's Sherlock Holmes - and was often drawn to resemble Doyle's most famous creation.

This particular book was published in 1952 and written by Walter Tyrer, a man who wrote a fair number of Sexton Blake adventures. I think the name is likely a pen name but I cant find anything out about the writer on the internet other than a list of titles he penned.

There's a rather good blog HERE that reviews many of the Sexton Blake adventures but the blog doesn't seem to be updated on a regular basis - pity.

Together with the Sexton Blake book I also picked up a bunch of old paperbacks as well as several issues of Warlord Comic. I do love browsing in secondhand books shops and Cardiff's Troutmark Books is an excellent store. I'd recommend a visit to anyone who finds themselves in Cardiff. You'll find it in the Castle Arcade which is across the road from Cardiff Castle.

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.

Riding the Pulp Trail

Paul S. Powers is a name well known to lovers of the old pulps, the prolific writer's name graced many a copy of Wild West Weekly as well as numerous other pulps.

And this new collection of twelve Paul Powers classics was named by yours truly. How cool is that? Laurie Powers, granddaughter of Paul Powers asked for suggestions regarding a title for this collection and my suggestion, Riding the Pulp Trail,  was used. I'm really pleased with that as it means my name is associated in some small way with a great slice of western fiction history.

Most fans of Western fiction know Paul S. Powers as one of the foundation authors of the famous pulp magazine of the 1930s and 1940s, Wild West Weekly. Now, here for the first time, are twelve Paul Powers stories written in the years after Wild West Weekly stopped publication. Six of these stories were published in magazines such as Exciting Western, Thrilling Western, The Rio Kid Western and Thrilling Ranch Stories. The other six are brand new stories—never before published—that were discovered in 2009. Altogether they make for an outstanding collection of western stories that represent the glory years of the Western short story and the best of Powers’ prolific pulp Western career.

Anyway check the book out HERE

PETERSON MAGAZINE 1898

An interesting scan from 1898, before the magazine merged with Argosy.
Click on the images for a larger version


















I've got a digital scan of the entire magazine - wish I had the real thing.

Pulp Love

The Archive loves the old pulps - there's a great pulp related article over on the excellent Yellow Perils - check it out pulp lovers HERE

WILD WEST WEEKLY 1936

Wild West Weekly - September 19th 1936 issue. This pulp was a gift from a very special friend and you should have seen my little eyes light up when I saw it. Wild West Weekly is highly regarded among western pulps fans - the quality of writers it attracted were usually high and the magazine was put together well with just the right amount of features amongst the fiction. The letters page, known as Wranglers Corner was also a hoot.

The lead story in this issue is a Oklahoma Kid novel - Gun Loot by Lee Bond. There was a movie made in 1939 starring James Cagney as The Oklahoma Kid but I'm not sure if that movie is any relation to the character from Wild West Weekly - it doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere on the wild west web, so I guess not. The movie kid and the pulp character seem to have been two distinct entities but if I'm wrong on this, someone out there is bound to know. The character was popular enough and the men behind the Cagney picture must have been aware of the pulp character's existence.

As you can see from the scan left the usual range of AD's are present and correct - and like the Range Romance (1944) I reviewed recently the train for a job in radio courses are numerous - man, there must have been a lot of people training to be radio technicians. And then TV comes along and they have to start all over again Mind you by the time the idiot box started to dominate the original pulps had mostly died a death.




Other AD's in this issue include a super duper modern typewriter for only $49.50 and you don't have to pay until after your 10 day free trial - I wonder if this things is compatible with Microsoft Word? Another home training course but nothing to do with radio - instead this dynamic easy to study programme will enable you to become a music teacher. There's also a revolutionary new belt, THE WEIL BELT, which when worn will make you appear inches slimmer. It claims to be able to reduce your waist by three inches in ten days. There are also a liberal sprinkling od promotions for the treatment if piles and spots.

You know I wouldn't mind betting that back in the day most people skipped these AD's, eager to get to the next thrilling story, but these days they have a unique historical worth and can tell a lot about the way life was in those dim distant days. The AD's would have been geared to the readership and typewriters, bulging bellies, pile treatments, and a fascination with working in radio must have prevailed.

And look at that handsome chap with the Half and Half pipe tobacco which, claims to give no bite at all to the smoker. I've never heard of that brand but I live in hope of trying it one day. You know old tins of pipe tobacco often pop up on Ebay and they can be revitalised with a little steam. I recently bought a tin of Three Nuns tobacco that was thirty five years old and it was the sweetest thing I've ever smoked.

This issue contains there complete western novels - Gun Loot by Lee Bond, Pete Rice Pays with Powder by Austin Gridley and Senor Red Mask's Six Gun Trail by Guy L. Maynard. There are also four complete western short stories, several non fiction old west historical pieces and the legendary letter's page, The Wranglers Corner in which reader's letters were answered by characters from the magazine. Issues talked about this time include, girls shouldn't be in the stories as they get in the way of a good action adventure and reader, Joe Scott takes exception with the stories about the Texas Rangers not having their characters armed with the correct equipment. Of course The Oklahoma Kid has an explanation for this.


And all this for 10c
Ahh, those were the days.

Later today on The Tainted Archive
Pattie's forgotten films - Riders of Destiny
The final part of the review of the pulp collection, Desert Justice.

RANCH ROMANCES August 1944

Subtitled: Love stories of the Real West, Ranch Romances was a pulp western magazine that was published by Warner publications of Chicago. It was a long running magazine and this issue is number 4 in volume 120. The cover price is 15c (I paid £12 for it) and it's in very good condition for a pulp of this age. There were also British editions of the magazine and these are fairly easy to find but this is an original American issue.

It contains 7 stories, one of which is a novel, another a novelette and the rest are short stories. The novel is this issue, which boasts the cover image, is Rangeland Bridgehead by Clee Woods.

The magazine seems to have been aimed at young women since all of the stories have a romantic element to them. The male characters are all macho, strong and domineering while the female characters are weak, sweet and in need of protection. They also have a habit of fainting clean away at the first sign of trouble - maybe there were a few male writers among those female pen names.

One of the things I always enjoy about the old pulps is the letters page - readers could always be relied upon to send off a note to the editor and not always in praise of the respective magazine. The letter page is this issue though is largely given over to pleas for pen pals.

A 17 year old boy from Marietta, Miss, who lists his interests as riding his bike, collecting stamps and sports want to correspond with people, of either sex with as view to friendship.

Maybe he should have gotten in touch with Delores from Wishek, who is 15 years old with long blond hair and blue eyes. She likes skating and dancing and is looking for loads of letters from pen pals out there. There's a poem entitled Cowboy Sergeant from Sam Allen Cofer from Texas and another from Juanita Penningtom of Hamilton entitled Cowboy in Khaki and is a touching poem that tells of how she misses her cowboy now that he's serving in the army. Remember the magazine was published during the penultimate year of World War II. Another poem tells of the author's desire to become a cowgirl.

The AD's are also fascinating with companies making claims about their product that are often outrageous and sometimes hilarious. Radio was a big thing at the time and several adverts are offering the reader the chance to become a radio expert and make big big money.

"Shortages in trained, skilled men (apparently women were too busy in the kitchen!) run into the hundreds of thousands. Wartime demand for radio experts is tremendous - so train now with National Schools of California."

The Charles Atlas AD is present and correct though what it is doing in a magazine with a primarily female readership is beyond me. There's also details of a course that will turn you into a fingerprint expert so you can go into the exciting world of law enforcement.

Then we've got AD's for the treatment of piles - Page's Palliative Pile Preparations - you'll bless the day you read this. Another AD offers several volumes of cowboy songs which will make you Sign like a Cowboy and The Richard Brothers of Chicago are asking for Poems to be used in a musical setting. The Newell Company have a new technique that they claim will guarantee you stop smoking, Pulvex flea powder is apparently the favourite among dog owners, Crown Dental are offering a free sample of their plate reliner that will tighten your false teeth and half a dozen other AD's are offering further courses in the wonderful modern technology called radio.

All in all another great addition to the Archive.

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.

WILD WEST WEEKLY - HISTORY OF A PULP MAGAZINE

Head over to the Black Horse Express for a great article by Laurie Powers on the history of pulp magazine, Wild West Weekly - HERE

MODERN WESTERN PULPS

THIS ARTICLE BY OUR OWN LANCE HOWARD/HOWARD HOPKINS WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON PULPRACK. IT IS REPRODUCED HERE WITH PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR.

Remember the days when action was king and nothing stood between a man and his horse except a saddle?

Recollect the times when the hero wore a white Stetson and soiled doves had hearts of tarnished gold?

Recall an era of blazing fiction when a knockdown, drag-out saloon brawl proved might was right and justice came at the smoking barrel of a Colt Peacemaker or a members-only neck tie party?

If you're a fan of the western pulps you durn sure do. For ten cents readers could saddle up a stallion, down bottomless glasses of redeye and cavort with the prettiest fillies this side of Dodge. Playing poker with Wild Bill or ridin' the written range with Buffalo Bill Cody, the only limits were imagination and Liberty dimes.

Those were the days. The Wild West. The Mythical West. Brimming with legend and crackling with tall tales told 'round the fire. Men were men, women were courted, and you dang sure knew who the bad guy was. And by the end of the tale you could count on that desperado getting his, usually by hanging from hemp or riddled with .45 slugs.

If you are a pulp western fan you might also pine for the days when you could walk to the local newsstand and select the latest Wild West or even Spicy Western Stories Magazine. Sadly, those brittle paeans to six-gun sovereignty no longer exist.

Most modern westerns are a trail apart from those halcyon days of dust and danger. In fact, many are slapped with the Historical genre label as publishers' marketing departments try to pretend the western is deader than Wild Bill himself. But for fans of the horse opera pulps a handful of modern writers seek to carry on the tradition, at least in spirit, while bending the literary horseshoe to the modern publishing requirements. Peter Brandvold, Ralph Cotton and a passel of others still pen tales of the Old West that hark back to the myth and pulp. Admittedly, the market appears minuscule at times, especially if you walk into a local Borders or Barnes & Noble in the North East, where I live, but rest assured they are out there if you search hard enough. Online ordering from Booksamillion and Amazon.com have made it easier to locate these novels, as have specialty online western stores such as Tombstone Books.

A couple sites that may surprise most western fans are AmazonUK and WHSmith, two British booksellers. You might wonder exactly what the Brits have to do with westerns, and rightly so. The answer may come as a pleasant discovery.

Two British companies -- one, a hardcover publisher named Robert Hale, Ltd. (these books are actually called "paperboards" and are small collectible hardcovers with colorful pulplike covers) and the other, a large print trade paperback company called Ulverscroft -- publish a monthly selection of old-fashioned westerns that come as close to the grand pulp days as you are likely to find. I know because I write for them under the penname Lance Howard.

Hale's imprint is called Black Horse Westerns (Ulverscroft's are called the Linford Western Library and Magna Dales Western Library) and they have been churning out 10 to 12 shoot 'em ups a month for many years. The books focus on the mythical west: gunfights, jangling spurs, sateen bodices with bulging bosoms -- you name it, chances are a Hale western has it. The writing spans the range from passable to excellent, much the way pulp writing did. The flavor is dust and it goes down jest fine with Old Orchard.

, please feel free to ride on over to my website and take a look around.

The cost to ship the westerns through AmazonUK, oddly enough, is no more expensive than getting the few titles Barnes and Noble has available for the U.S. In fact, it is often cheaper, as exchange rates fluctuate. While I unabashedly suggest running an AmazonUK search for Lance Howard, try running Black Horse Westerns, then browse through the books that come up. Black Horse is carrying on the pulp tradition, with a minimal of modern intrusion. Give them a try! I think you'll enjoy them.

-submitted by Howard Hopkins

NOTE -This article is several years old but I've republished it here for Archive readers as it still gives an interesting insight into the Black Horse Western Books.