A Writer's Guide to Pulp Fiction #1: A Short-ish History of the Pulps

The Saucy Adventure Guide to Spicy Romance, High Adventure, and Three-Fisted Weird Detectives

Sep 08, 2024

'The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.'
— Isaac Asimov

I’ve always loved pulp fiction stories. I blame my grandpa.

My Pop loved two things more than anything else in life — dad jokes and Perry Mason. When I was a kid, he got me hooked on the work of Earle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason.

You probably know Perry from either the old Raymond Burr TV series from 1957, or the new version on HBO. You might even know Perry from the endless novels that Gardner wrote, and my Pop pawned off on me when I was a kid. Maybe you even imagined yourself, like I did, as Paul Drake or Perry or the queen of sass, Della Street.

But what you may not know is that Perry Mason didn’t originate in novels. America’s favorite defense attorney was born in the pulps.

Surprised? I wouldn’t blame you. We hear all the time about how pulps are a dead form. There are no pulp heroes anymore — tastes changed! The world moved on! There’s no place for those kinds of stories anymore.

That, my friends, is abject horseshit.

There’s still a place for what we call “pulp fiction.” It never really went away. I’d argue that we’re living in a second golden age of it — or right on the cusp.

But first — you need to understand where the pulps come from.

The Penny Dreadfuls of Newgate

I’m a bookseller. Mostly, I deal in midcentury fine bindings and fin de seicle cloth bindings. But I’ve become something of a historian of the forgotten and ignored books that snobs of the book world turn their nose up at. I adore book club editions and the predecessors of the modern genre novels — the penny dreadfuls and dime novels.

The Victorian Age brought a lot of changes to publishing. Not least of which was the “Newgate novel.” Books became cheaper to print, and thanks to industrialization — could be printed and distributed much, much cheaper than they were before. Even in the mid-19th century, it wasn’t unusual to find books bound in leather, and still bound by booksellers themselves (a tradition that began in the heart of European publishing’s history — Germany — and a few very old, very traditional bookshops in Germany still offer bookbinding services in-house).

A little earlier, in the 1820s, a new form rose out of the new book-factories.

The Newgate novel, that circulated from around 1820 to the 1840s, were something like the true crime novels and podcasts we have today — they sensationalized and mildly fictionalized the lives of criminals. A handful of these were more “literary” — Chuck Dickens’ Oliver Twist is technically a Newgate novel — but the peak of this form was William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, one of the first popular novels to receive an adaption — to the stage. It dramatized the life and crimes of one real-life Jack Sheppard, a thief and renowned escape artist who was hanged in 1724.

William Makepeace Thackeray hated Newgate novels, so much that his novel Catherine is a blatant satire of the form. Why?

Well, he thought it wasn’t “real” literature, and it was corrupting the youth. He claimed that vendors hawked "Jack Sheppard bags", filled with burglary tools, in the lobbies of the theatres where Ainsworth's story was playing and "one or two young gentlemen have already confessed how much they were indebted to Jack Sheppard who gave them ideas of pocket-picking and thieving [which] they never would have had but for the play".

This is important — because this era marked the distinction between “high” literature (and art, more broadly) — the literature of the academy, and people like Thackeray — and “low” literature, stories published for common people to read.

This came to a head in 1840 with the murder of Lord William Russell by François Benjamin Courvoisier, his valet. Courvoisier claimed in court he’d been inspired by Jack Sheppard, causing the Lord Chamberlain to ban performances of Sheppard, and kicking off a moral panic about Newgate novels (led, of course, by Thackeray, among others). Thackeray saved the bulk of his vitriol for — Charles Dickens, particularly Oliver Twist.

Bah! what figments these novelists tell us! Boz, who knows life well, knows that his Miss Nancy is the most unreal fantastical personage possible; no more like a thief's mistress than one of Gesner's shepherdesses resembles a real country wench. He dare not tell the truth concerning such young ladies.
— William Makepeace Thackerary, Anti-Fun Activist and Occasional Novelist

The Newgate novel’s conversation turned into how “bloody” and “dreadful” they were. That, coupled with publishers churning them out ever-more cheaply (often for a penny farthing apiece), led Newgates to be lumped in with something a little more familiar— the penny dreadful.

These very much were in the vein of Dickens. Often, they were put together from stories serialized in magazines like The Strand and Argosy — names that would be very familiar to pulp magazine readers 50 years later. Or, they’d be published by small publishing houses in a chapbook (the cheapest way to bind a book, usually with a sewn spine or, later, staples) of about 8 to 16 pages, sold for a penny.

Early ones would follow the Newgate tradition, featuring stories about Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin, and Jack the Ripper.

Those ended up being popular. They’re also considered the first modern form of mainstream literature and had a big influence on Victorian pop culture. The Guardian’s Kate Summerscale called them, “the Victorian equivalent of video games,” for kids.

By the late 19th century, these would be bound into thicker reprint editions (often called “yellow backs,” for their cheap, yellow covers), longer literary magazines (called “story papers,” to differentiate from the “serious” culture magazines like Harper’s), and pulp paper magazines — the earliest pulps.

These were called “dime novels.” Much like the penny dreadful (or “penny blood”), they got their name from their price tag. The thicker yellow backs sold for a dime, and story papers ran, still, about a penny, in the early days.

“Penny dreadful” and “dime novel” are still used as a pejorative today, but more often you’ll hear another term coined in the era — the potboiler.

A potboiler is a novel written quickly, and usually for money (as opposed to slaving over something for half a lifetime for the art, you know?). It gets its name from something an author did to “boil the pot,” or keep themselves fed. As opposed to starving for grand literature, I guess.

The potboiler you’ll hear about again in here, but they were the dime novel era’s equivalent of popcorn flicks and B-movies.

The dime novel had conventions that would be very familiar to pulp readers — sensationalized titles, vivid (sometimes lurid) cover art (modern, graphic book cover design was born of the dime novels, not from bookbinders’ art), melodramatic titles, and marketing flash statements.

In the U.S., these would depict the life and crimes of the outlaws of the Old West and the American frontier period. This is a neat little corner of history unto itself, because the period we call the Wild West was largely mythologized in its own time by the dime novels, that would blend real facts with sensationalized retellings. It was, in a way, New Journalism before New Journalism. Gonzo before Hunter S. Thompson. It was led by people like Bat Masterson, who was, in a lot of ways, his generation’s Hunter S. Thompson. A journalist by trade (he wrote a ton of sports coverage), he was also a prolific dime novelist. Because of Masterson and those like him (notably the tall tales of Wyatt Earp himself), its hard — even today — for historians to parse fact from fiction.

But in that era, a cheaper form of paper became available. Advances in papermaking led to the rise of pulp paper — ideal for using in cheaper magazines.

And so, the pulps were born. Named for the paper used to print them.

From Argosy to Weird Tales

The very first of these was Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy magazine in 1896. It was a behemoth even in its day, running about the length of a novel every issue (135,000 words). It had no illustrations inside or on the cover, and the page edges were untrimmed (to cut costs).

A ton of authors got their start thanks to Munsey. Nobody before him had combined cheap printing, dirt-cheap paper, and starving authors to make a magazine.

Street & Smith — a big name in the era to come — would follow up. They’d made their money printing dime novels and weekly boys’ magazines, and in 1903, they introduced The Popular Magazine. Not the most inspired title, but it did two big things by 1905 — it introduced color illustrations (particularly on the cover), and it brought a “real” author to the pulps in H. Rider Haggard, when Street & Smith picked up the rights to serialize his latest novel, Ayesha.

Street & Smith would gain ground on Argosy, and branched out to genre magazines. Each title would focus on a specific kind of writing — detective stories, sports stories (boxing pulps were incredibly popular), spicy romance, sword and sorcery, and so on.

Between the 1920s and 1940s was the golden age of the pulp.

Writer Frank Gruber said in 1934 there were some 150 separate titles on the market. Some of the biggest names in the period were Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Spicy Detective, Saucy, and Weird Tales.

They were a staple in the Great Depression, particularly in areas affected by the Dust Bowl. They were cheap, readily available, and offered fun, escapist entertainment to an entire generation of readers.

It’s important to spell this part out: pulp fiction is still widely associated with “men’s fiction,” and this was a part of the era — called “the sweats.” These were the men’s adventure magazines that would publish Lester Dent’s Doc Savage and would come to be associated with Robert Howard’s work with Conan the Barbarian. The sweats got their name from the magazine being rolled up and tucked under a man’s arm — where it would get sweaty, because they weren’t “slicks,” the gloss-covered “proper” magazines that would (by virtue of being shiny-coated) repel sweat.

But pulps also did a brisk business in women’s fiction.

And this is more apparent following the decline of the pulp magazines.

The Times They Were A-Changin’

There’s been debate ever since the end of World War II as to what caused the decline of pulps. Likely, it was a lot of things.

Paper shortages during the war caused the publishers to suffer. Many also lost authors to service in the war. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine was the first to switch to a smaller digest format (you know the smaller-sized TV Guide or recipe magazines on the grocery store rack? That’s digest-sized) in 1941, and others followed suit.

Street & Smith would move almost entirely into slicks by 1949.

This era marked two big shifts in publishing.

The most relevant one was that mainstream book publishers had caught on that pulp magazines were selling very well. They began using similar methods — cheaper paper, smaller size, using paper covers — to produce the first paperbacks. These were, at the time, something between the dime novel and the pulp. It was largely the realm of cheap, lurid, sensational fiction. “Literature,” was still bound in board and cloth or leather.

Men’s adventure magazines (the sweaty ones, remember?) also picked up steam during this time, sitting in a market between the pulps and slicks.

The other big shift — was the rise of comic books.

Comics grew up parallel to the pulps, and in their earliest form, covered the same subject matter in England, usually running in the story papers. When they moved to America, they got their name from Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, published in 1933, reprinting newspaper humor comic strips and introducing more Americans to the form. Many of the heroes originally found in the pulps would be sanitized somewhat and reprinted into children’s comic books — the ancestors of what we know as “superheroes,” today. These were heroes like The Sandman, The Shadow, and the Blue Beetle that would go on to influence generations of comic writers.

TV also played a role in the decline of the pulps. It was easier to stay home and watch TV, rather than go out to see a movie as a family.

The pulps are generally agreed to have declined off a cliff in 1957, with the liquidation of the American News Company, the primary distributor of pulps at the time.

People still read, but reading had drifted from people’s primary form of entertainment as a whole.

But two other big changes also influenced the decline of pulps-as-they-were. And probably not the ones you might expect.

Lord, I Was Born a Ramblin’ Man

What if I were to tell you that Ike Eisenhower killed the pulps?

That might be a little hyperbolic, but only a little. The interstate highway system, with backing legislation passed in 1956, would drastically change the face of American infrastructure. Americans wouldn’t rely on cities for housing anymore. Commuting became more common, and people traveled in cars much more frequently — where they’d been commuting on trains and streetcars before.

Commuting on a bus, train, or streetcar gives someone more time to read (hopefully) than driving a car. Pulps for men and women were a very common, very cheap form of entertainment for their commutes.

The other big shift was air travel.

In 1955, for the first time ever, more Americans traveled by air than by train. By 1957, aircraft had replaced ocean liners for crossing the Atlantic.

This had a singular consequence — people traveled farther from home. While air travel was expensive, and much more expensive than it is today, it made traveling long distances cheaper and faster than by train or ocean liner. This meant that travel time was made up of more sitting (rather than repeatedly changing trains, or having activities on board on a ship). And that led to something we all recognize today —

The airport novel.

Call it what you want — the airplane novel, the beach novel, the trashy romance novel, the James Patterson/Dan Brown novel, whatever.

In the U.S. (and most of the anglosphere) they’re called the airport novel. In France (and the French-speaking world) and Japan, they’re called “train station novels,” for the same reason. They’re ubiquitous in airport and train station newsstands.

This is a tradition that had also grown up alongside the pulps.

By 1851, one W.H. Smith had made his name sticking bookstores into train stations in the U.K. Railway station newsstands began selling inexpensive books around that time. The Times in 1851 described their stock as "French novels, unfortunately, of questionable character."

Sales were so high that Athenaeum in 1849 predicted that railway newsstands might replace traditional bookstores. The Times later said that "persons of the better class, who constitute the larger portion of railway readers, lose their accustomed taste the moment they smell the engine and present themselves to the railway librarian."

In book publishing, pulps and airport novels blended in the wake of World War II.

The most popular airport novels are exactly what were popular in the pulps — genre fiction:

Detective stories
Historical romance
“Saucy” romance (the predecessor of sassy chick-lit is pulp-style romance)
Spy thrillers
Crime thrillers

They (and their authors) are often described exactly how pulp writers and their work was — potboilers, written by hacks only interested in making money from their writing.

One of the best examples of how pulps evolved during this period is Harlequin. Harlequin Romance was founded in 1949 — right at the end of the pulp era.

I imagine you have some idea about Harlequin — they publish those Fabio-covered, cheesy, bodice-ripper books, right?

Well, yes. But, what if I told you that they didn’t always do that?

In its early days, Harlequin was a reprint publisher. That’s, simply, a publisher that buys rights to print an earlier work (or takes something from the public domain and prints it). One of their bestsellers early on was Arthur Conan Doyle.

Harlequin also published Agatha Christie and W. Somerset Maugham. Its first big success was Jean Plaidy’s Beyond the Blue Mountain (1951), selling 30,000 copies. That was when it became associated with romance. Because Jean Plaidy wasn’t Jean Plaidy.

Jean Plaidy was Eleanor Alice Burford, a legend in the romance genre, and winner of the Golden Treasure award from the Romance Writers of America in 1989. By the time of her death, she had written more than 200 books, under a collection of pen names —including Jean Plaidy, selling more than 100 million copies and had been translated into 20 languages.

And her early career? She wrote short fiction for The Times, Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Realm, and The Star, inheritors of pulp publishing in journalism, after their decline.

Harlequin entered into a (literal) handshake partnership with Mills & Boon, and that marked the beginning of their return into pulp-style (read: spicy) romance. It was reluctant to publish more explicit content, but after market testing found that readers vastly preferred it, the company began acquiring and printing more spicy romance in the style of the pulps.

This also marked the era of the Harlequin formula. During this period, they gave their writers guidelines on how to write and structure novels published with them, leading to the rise of trope-based romance fiction today. Harlequin arguably perfected this method for writing popular fiction, but it’s a technique born in the pulp era.

It wouldn’t sound terribly unfamiliar to Lester Dent, for example, who outlined his own method for producing an endless stream of sellable short stories. Earle Stanley Gardner used a similar method, with his “plot wheel” story generator.

Harlequin understood, as did Dent, as did Gardner, as does James Patterson today, that it’s ok — and good for business — to be a productive author whose only goal with writing is to get paid for giving one of writers’ greatest gifts to readers — a way to help them escape their day, find joy, and have fun.

What Happened to the Pulps?

They didn’t die, for one thing.

They became paperbacks. They became comics. The stories are still here, the same kinds of heroes and lovers still as in-demand as ever. The disappearance of the pulps was largely due to problems within the magazine trade and changing lifestyles, and not with the form or the content.

You can see that even today — with pulp-style romance being one of the biggest sellers in the market today. We just call it “romantasy,” or “spicy romance.” “Erotica,” is its more highfalutin, literary snob cousin.

But it’s not unique to romance.

Fantasy and sci-fi largely buried its roots with the rise of Tolkien and Herbert — and decided the sister genres needed to become more “literary.” Hard sci-fi took over on that side of things for many years, shoving the second-biggest seller (military sci-fi and space opera and science fantasy/”sword and planet”— the very stuff of the pulps, and Star Wars) aside. Fantasy went on its merry way back toward chivalric romances and endless Tolkien reworks.

But then, something interesting happened with the rise of e-readers.

Fantasy began twisting back toward its roots, becoming ever more grimdark, bleak, and full of strange and bizarre magic. A land Conan and King Kull would’ve felt right at home in. At least until Brandon Sanderson began Mormonizing fantasy and a generation that grew up on shounen anime fell in love with progression fantasy (ironically, manga and anime fantasy was heavily influenced by the pulps and early paperbacks, aside from imported American film — itself influenced by the pulps by way of the Republic serial).

Sci-fi began getting ripped from the hands of basement-dwelling neckbeards and put back in the hands of normal people who loved Star Wars and people like Ruby Dixon — who reminded the world what pulpy sword-and-planet sci-fi looks like with Ice Planet Barbarians. IPB would be right at home in plenty of the pulps of the early 20th century — for men or women.

With the rise of Wattpad, Royal Road, and Kindle Vella, we’ve also seen a renewed interest in serialized and short fiction.

The top genres on Vella right now?

They’ll look familiar.

Fantasy, romance, sci-fi, horror, mysteries, and thrillers.

The modern pulps — genre fiction, written in bulk, at an affordable price point. The literature of the people — just not the literature of the academy.

Even the “tag bloat,” in titles and blurbs that are controversial among readers today, weren’t always so controversial.

Look at some of the old pulp covers. The Library of Congress has a massive collection. You’ll find they’re a little familiar — they’re descriptive of what’s in there. Some are spicier and more suggestive. Some are tongue-in-cheek sensational. Others are played for laughs. Just like tags today.

The pulps never went away. They just got thicker for a long time. And today? They’re coming back. Just on a screen, rather than on pulp paper.