Tag: The Pulps

The Pulps: ‘The Dinner Cooked in Hell’

We have been moving our way a story at a time through The Pulps, an anthology published in 1970. The last few entries have been through a section of the book called “Exploiting the Girls,” which contains examples of the seamier side of pulp literature. The last of the stories in this section is also the best, “The Dinner Cooked in Hell” by Mindret Lord, a tale from Startling Mystery Magazine, originally published in 1940.

The story is told in first person by a man who, along with his life, is arriving home in anticipation of hosting a small dinner. When they arrive at their house, however, the couple find that their usual maid is absent, and an exotically beautiful stranger, Lucia, has taken her place. Lucia seems to know her way around the kitchen, but the dishes she serves to the couple and her guest are strange in appearance and taste—and the reader can easily guess that they contain human flesh and blood. After Lucia serves up this gruesome meal, her henchmen arrive to capture the couple and their guests and murder them in a bizarre sacrifice.

Although I think this is the best story in this section, the editor, Tony Goodstone, is of the opposite opinion: He refers to Startling Mystery as one of the “really sadistic Pulps” whose stories were “belabored,” “forced,” and “self-conscious.” By contrast, I would say that, while grotesque, “Dinner” at least avoids the titillating exploitation of sexual violence that mars the other tales in this section.

The story’s great failing is that its protagonist is merely a passive observer of some ugly happenings, with the result that the story has no real plot, though it still succeeds as a work of horror because of its unsettling details. There is a harrowing escape at the end, but it takes place only because of chance and not because of any decisive action on the part of the characters.

The Pulps: ‘Labyrinth of Monsters’

We now come to what is probably the second worst story in the collection, “Labyrinth of Monsters” by Robert Leslie Bellem, who had a previouly entry in the form of one of his infamous Dan Turner stories. “Labyrinth of Monsters” appeared in Spicy Mystery in 1937. Like the other magazines of the “spicy” line, this one featured a heavy dose of sexual content to go with the otherwise common genre themes.

In reviewing these stories, I have repeatedly used the word workmanlike. These are shorts by men who knew their craft, who could sit down at a typewriter and pound out, at the rate of at least one a week, a story with a well-designed plot and good prose. Their work was almost always of good quality even if it was only rarely that they produced a true gem. Some of the authors featured here would win accolades in other fields: Some are pulitzer winners, and some, like Ray Bradbury, wrote on such a level that they commanded respect despite their chosen medium.

Bellem, on the other hand, is purely an exploitation writer whose skill is outrageous metaphors and carefully described women’s torsos. Most of the stories in this collection are better edited than a typical mainstream novel today, but “Labyrinth of Monsters” has grammatical errors and malapropisms left and right.

The story features a he-man named Travis Brant, who for reasons I forget is renting half a duplex in an isolated town called Ghost Cove. Next door to him is a voluptuous woman, Anne Barnard, who screams in terror when she witnesses another woman having her throat torn out by a half-human, half-spider monstrosity. Travis kills the monster and rescues Anne, and then the two them, naturally, call the police. The policeman who arrives on the scene acts oddly, but Travis and Anne are curiously unsuspicious as he takes them up to an old mansion where a mad scientist, Dr. Zenarro, soon takes them prisoner. A Frankenstein of a particularly exploitative variety, Zenarro kidnaps women and forces them to breed with a mutant beast who sires monstrous offspring with multiple heads or limbs.

The story then proceeds much as expected with horrifying vistas, harrowing escapes, and bloody action scenes. Although morbid and poorly written, it’s reasonable effective as a horror story. Had it more dignity, it might have come from the pen of Lovecraft. What really mars it is Travis’s ridiculously inappropriate habit of trying to cop a feel from Anne at every opportunity: The poor woman has just witnessed murder by an arachnoid mutant, so she flies to Travis’s arms for safety, and his first instinct is to grab her breasts. As with the other examples of “spicy” stories here, the spiciness is a detriment.

The Pulps: ‘The Purple Heart of Erlik’

We will pass over in silence a few sketch pieces and poems that follow “Hot Rompers,” which we previously discussed, in this pulp anthology, and move on to “The Purple Heart of Erlik,” a tale by none other than Robert E. Howard, writing under the pen name of Sam Walser. It originally appeared in Spicy Adventure in 1936.

As the editor, Tony Goodstone, remarks, “Purple Heart” is “a sharp contrast to his more familiar work,” that work being primarily the stories of Conan the Cimmerian. Although the Conan stories are often racy (Conan is a lusty savage, and his heroines easily lose their filmy clothes), Howard nonetheless has a sense of restraint that in “Purple Heart” is not in evidence, probably because he was obliged to “spice things up” for Spicy Adventure. Partly for that reason, this is not his best work, but his considerable skill as an adventure writer is still evident, making this one of the better stories in the collection.

Set in the sordid back alleys of Shanghai, the story opens by introducing Arline, an adventuress who has recently been cornered by a treasure hunter who can frame her for murder. In exchange for his silence, he forces her to attempt to steal the titular Purple Heart, an enormous ruby in the possession of a ruthless Chinese gangster. Her attempt on the ruby fails, and the Chinese gangster elects to punish her with rape—and, shockingly, the rape actually happens. Were this a Conan story, Conan would have leapt into the room and slain Arline’s attacker before he had his trousers off. But alas, Conan is not here.

Arline does have a hero, however, by the name of Wild Bill Clanton, a sailor and smuggler who, out of infatuation, has been following her like a helpless puppy. Although Arline has rebuffed his decidedly rough advances, desperation finally sends her into his arms. With a combination of muscle and double-crossing, the two of them manage to avenge themselves and make it out alive.

This story displays something I noted repeatedly while reading through this collection: The “spicy” stories are competently written, but their risqué elements generally make them worse, not better. A reader can easily imagine how this might have been a better tale, and a less distasteful one, if Howard had not been obliged to try to titillate with a rape scene. There is still some good adventure here, but in the end, it’s all rather gross. The adventure pulps without “spicy” in their names showed more restraint when portraying Shanghai alleyways, and were better for it.

The Pulps: ‘Hot Rompers’

This anthology through which we’re slowly walking, The Pulps, spends too much time on what its editor, Tony Goodstone, calls “under the counter” magazines, ones that were too graphic in their sexual content to be sold with the regular fair. Some of these, such as Spicy Detective, which we’ve already discussed, had a modicum of fame and influence, but many of the others are largely (and better left) forgotten. If Goodstone’s aim was to rehabilitate the reputation of the pulps by showcasing their quality and variety, he might have done better to leave the “under the counter” pulps under the counter where they belong. It is primarily because of these exploitative stories that this collection varies wildly in its quality, with Pulitzer winners rubbing shoulders with pornographers—but I suppose one could argue that this characterizes the pulps as a whole, a mixed bag of themed magazines whose readers never quite knew what they’d get when the next issue came out.

Speaking of pornographers, the next work in the collection is “Hot Rompers” by Russ West, which Goodstone describes as “passing as pornography in its day.” Although mild by the standards of the jaded internet age, we could argue that it still passes for pornography, assuming that we use pornography’s customary definition—a work designed for sexual titillation with no redeeming artistic quality.  The titillation “Hot Rompers” offered in 1931, when it appeared in Parisienne Life, might fail to move the modern reader who can see harder fare simply by turning on the television, but it is certainly designed to titillate, and it certainly lacks redeeming artistic quality. This is the worst story in the collection, hands down.

The story is mildly interesting when it begins, but it quickly derails. Our protagonist, the Frenchman Ferdinand de Brissac, is intent on murder: He has recently discovered that an American interloper has been sleeping with his wife. Gun in his pocket, he tracks this American scoundrel to a strip joint called the Club du Nord, where he finds him dallying with ladies of the evening.

This premise of vengeance in the sordid streets of Gay Paree is halfway interesting, but the plot ceases to exist after five paragraphs. A spotlight strikes the stage, a nude woman begins dancing (described in breathless detail, of course), and all is forgotten: Ferdinand follows this woman backstage, has a dalliance with her in her dressing room … and that’s about it. That’s the whole of the story.

“Hot Rompers” pretends to be nothing other than what it is, a work of light pornography, so we need say no more about it because it deserves to have no more said about it. Pornographic literature is very probably as old as human writing, and most of it has been easily forgotten dreck.

But since we’re on the subject, it calls certain other thoughts to my mind, so I will segue: It has long been my opinion that literature, for almost a century now, has been suffering under a curse first laid on it by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence, who wrote Lady Chatterly’s Lover among other things, believed that pornography could be rehabilitated, that it could be made sweet and tender, and that even the word fuck might be lovely and musical in certain contexts. Despite Lawrence’s own failure to make fuck sound and nice and gentle despite herculean effort, our literati have taken him at his word and have thus frequently subjected their readers to sex scenes that even the “under the counter” writers would blush at, scenes that mar otherwise competently written novels.

I used to follow a social media account that collected such scenes, though I decided to stop after it became too graphic. This account, run by a crotchety feminist, characterized badly written sex scenes as the fault of “men writing women,” but it became clear over time that the problem was neither men writing, nor men trying to describe women, but men trying to describe sex.

C. S. Lewis once explained why writing sex well is impossible. Among his other projects, he took on D. H. Lawrence’s premises and exploded them. He first did a linguistic study that proved, contra Lawrence, that swear words like fuck did not have some noble history that needed to be recalled and rehabilitated; rather, it is the custom in every language to set aside certain words associated with bodily functions and use them for the dual purpose of evoking belly laughs and inciting anger. Fuck is an ancient word that has always served these two purposes.

Lewis also, when interviewed for television on the subject of erotic literature, explained briefly and pointedly why explicit sex scenes are always so badly written—because an author who wants to describe sex explicitly is limited by the very nature of language; he can use the terminology of the operating theater or the terminology of the gutter, but he has no third option.

That is why the best literature dealing with sex does not address its subject directly but instead talks of gardens in bloom and scented unguents and leaping gazelles and flitting butterflies. The Bible itself teaches us this in the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s, one of the world’s greatest works of erotic literature. The reader who studies that book will notice, above all, that it contains no explicit or direct description of its subject. Indeed, it does not even dare to have a narrative structure but is instead content to be a powerful collection of evocative vignettes.

In the written word, metaphor is sexy but sex itself is not. In fact, this is true of any medium, not just writing: Bodies ramming into each other, when viewed by a third party, are gruesome, and that is why Hollywood made better romantic movies under the Hayes Code when it had to represent sex with waving curtains.

A writer of fiction who wishes to write about sex should avoid directly describing it for the same reason he should avoid giving dialogue to God: Because it inevitably diminishes the subject.

The Pulps: ‘Wake for the Living’

The last story in this collection that is marked as a mystery is “Wake for the Living” by Ray Bradbury. It is not really a detective story, but it was published, in 1947, in Dime Mystery Magazine. Many years ago in high school, I believed I had read everything Bradbury ever wrote, but I was of course mistaken, and this story is one I’m pretty sure I haven’t read before.

The story, like most of Bradbury’s, is simple. It is a standout in this collection not only because of the author’s fame but because it is characteristic of the author’s style: Poetical language, fantastical details, minimal plot, and an ironical, bitter ending.

To describe the story at any length is to give it away, though the ending is easy enough to see coming. The story features two brothers, Richard and Charles Braling, who hate each other. Both are elderly, and Charles, in his workshop, is building what he claims will be the ultimate coffin, capable of saving the expense of most funerals. The coffin is huge and full of complex mechanical parts. Charles asks to be buried in it when he dies, but his younger brother Richard defies his wishes.

Once Charles is dead and in the ground in a conventional coffin, Richard, out of curiosity, climbs into Charles’s invention. It turns out that the coffin is a machine capable of carrying out all the elements of a funeral and burial service by itself: It slams the lid shut on Charles, and the story from there proceeds just as you might expect.

This tale does not exactly have any unexpected twists, and aside from the mystery of what Charles’s coffin is (which the reader can easily guess), it contains no mystery. Bradbury’s whimsical writing, however, keeps it interesting despite its predictability.

The Pulps: ‘The Torture Pool’

As proof that the pulps are not lightly dismissed, we have a story by MacKinlay Kantor, who later won a Pulitzer for his novel Andersonville. This collection presents his story “The Torture Pool,” which appeared in 1932 in Detective Ficiton Weekly.

Despite the (evetual) credentials of its author, this story returns us to the general status of this collection: Solid, workmanlike, competent, and somewhat forgettable. The last story stood out because it was outrageous. This story, although one of the better ones in the mystery section, is not so outlandishly entertaining.

The story follows a man who runs gift shop in a small, out-of-the-way town that happens to be a tourist spot. His brother had been a hermit who’d amassed a small but respectable fortune through meager living and selling wild herbs, and he had, five years previous, been found dead, apparently killed for his money.

“The Torture Pool” is notable mostly for its atmosphere, capturing as it does the sun-drenched and swampy backwater in which it takes place. Unfortunately, it lacks tension: It follows a cold case, and the killer’s identity is obvious from the beginning. In fact, the story is not about finding out whodunnit but about the protagonist, who already knows whodunnit, finding a creative way to force the killer to confess (the “torture pool” of the title is a pool of quicksand). The climax is a little contrived, but the extensive cultural and environmental details make it engrossing.

The Pulps: ‘Death’s Passport’

This collection contains two stories by Robert Leslie Bellem, unfortunately. Bellem wrote racy work that appeared in so-called “under the counter” pulps, and his sexually charged writing was infamous enough to get a mocking in The New Yorker, where satirist S. J. Perelman skewered his purple prose in the essay “Somewhere a Roscoe,” which is a truly entertaining work if you can find it (The New Yorker has it behind a paywall, but the Internet Archive will let you borrow it).

If you ever have the chance to read Perelman, you will discover some delightful wordplay as well as several snapshots of serial publications before the middle of the last century. But in “Somewhere a Roscoe,” he does not have to employ his usual wit: He simply quotes Bellem repeatedly, and the quotes are sufficiently goofy to supply all the necessary jokes.

The first example of Bellem’s writing in this anthology is easily the better of the two, though it is the worst of the mystery stories. “Death’s Passport” features Bellem’s most famous creation, the hard-boiled and perpetually horny detective Dan Turner. This story appeared in 1940 in Spicy Detective, a pulp dedicated to mystery stories with risqué content and themes. According to Perelman, Spicy Detective published “the sauciest blend of libido and murder this side of the Gille de Rais.” Dan Turner eventually got his own magazine, Hollywood Detective, which ran from 1942 to 1950. There have also been a couple of movies based on Dan Turner—both of them, as far as I can tell, obscure.

As for “Death’s Passport,” it has a good story buried under it, but that good story is covered with a heavy layer of stupid. Turner comes home one night to find a man in his apartment who’s supposed to be dead: Kensington had supposedly attempted a trans-Atlantic solo flight and died in a crash over the ocean, but he had in fact chickened out and sent another man in his place, a man who was murdered by means of a sabotaged plane.

The story features some double-crosses and dangerous femmes fatales. It is most notable for being written in overdone slang so inventive and absurd that this story is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. While the slang is merely silly, the obligatory sexual elements do damage to an otherwise engaging plot: At one point, Turner follows a woman back to her place and attempts to seduce her, but when she acts distracted, he instantly concludes that she must be the killer—because only a woman who had recently committed murder could possibly be less than enthusiastic about Turner’s affections!

To give some flavor, I’ll give some quotes. Here is a typical example of Dan Turner describing a woman:

She was embellished in a nightgown three shades thinner than watered whiskey and a lot more potent. Through the gossamer material I could tab her various tempting thems and thoses—including a pair of tapered white gams, a set of lyric hips, and a duet of curves that made my fingers tingle up to the elbows. Some damsels are built that way: just looking at them makes you pine for your vanished youth.

In fact, every damsel Turner encounters is built that way. Plain, dumpy, elderly, or fully clothed women simply don’t exist in his universe. Every woman is in her twenties, scantily clad, round in all the right places, and willing.

And every passage, no matter how mundane its contents, contains a barrage of inventive analogies:

I’ll say one thing for Dave Donaldson: when he scents a pinch in the offing he can drive like a maniac. He blooped that sedan up to seventy from a standing start; kicked the everlasting tripes out of it. The yellow-haired Vale cutie shivered against me like a cat coughing up lamb-chops; she must have thought she was headed for the pearly gates. Her even little teeth chattered like pennies in a Salvation Army tambourine.

Admittedly, this is one of the most entertaining stories in the collection, but it’s entertaining in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way. Although this anthology contains no true standouts, most of the stories display the workmanlike style and solid construction that characterized the pulps. Bellem’s work, on the other hand, represents what the pulps have unjustly been remembered for—overwrought prose and exploitative themes.

The Pulps: ‘The Deadly Orchid’

Probably the best of the detective stories in the collection, or at least the most involved, is this one by T. T. Flynn, originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1933. The hard-boiled narrator has been hired to take down the “Orchid,” a seductress and blackmailer, who has incriminating letters that can destroy a banker. Teamed with a female sidekick with a sharp tongue, the narrator has pose as a newlywed and find a way to beat the Orchid at her own game.

The story rides largely on the banter between the characters, especially the narrator and the woman posing as his wife. They fight in the usual manner, displaying mutual exasperation and mutual attraction. The story’s conclusion hinges on some creative devices and a few implausibilities. It makes for entertaining reading, though there are no true surprises.

The Pulps: ‘One Hour’

Dashiell Hammett was one of the pioneers of “hard-boiled” detective fiction and is now considered one of the greatest mystery writers of all time, so this collection rightly includes an example of his work. Hammett led a colorful life, having worked as a Pinkerton agent and later serving a prison sentence for running a Communist front group, and he made considerable contributions not only to literature but to comic strips and film.

“One Hour” stars the Continental Op, one of his recurring characters, a detective working for the fiction Continental Detective Agency. “One Hour” contains a complicated murder mystery, but its gimmick, as suggested by the title, is that the Op solves it in only one hour’s time, mostly by stumbling upon the solution and then engaging in a lengthy battle as he corners the evildoers. Goodstone apparently selected it to showcase the directness and brevity of Hammett’s narration.

The story finds the Op asked to solve a murder committed with a stolen car. Despite the terse description and brief time span, the story is a bit hard to follow as grasping both the mystery itself and its solution requires the reader to keep careful track of certain spatial relationships between streets and buildings. However, its centerpiece is neither the mystery nor its solution but the fistfight at the climax, which fills a full page and a half of a six-page story.

Much as I enjoyed reading this, I can’t help but ask if it’s the best example of Hammett’s work. It’s an early story, published in Black Mask in 1924, and its gimmick makes it feel anticlimactic since the Op solves the mystery with such little legwork, hitting on the answer while still doing the preliminary, routine questioning of witnesses and suspects.

The Pulps: ‘Mr. Alias, Burglar’

As we get into the mystery-story section of The Pulps, we first encounter “Mr. Alias, Burglar” by Ridrigues Ottolengui. Although amusing in a way, it is obviously inspired by Sherlock Holmes and suffers from the defects of some of the worst Sherlock Holmes stories.

The tale opens by introducing Mitchel, a wealthy and extremely self-confident amateur detective who apparently solves murder cases after the typical drawing-room fashion. A man who goes by the name of Alias approaches him and declares that he can rob him without his detection. They agree to bet on this and then go their separate ways, Alias to the work of committing ther robbery and Mitchell to the work of foiling or detecting it.

As Tony Goodstone points out in his brief commentary on this story, it commits the “cardinal sin” of revealing all the clues at the end instead of delivering them throughout the story for the reader to figure out—but it has to do this because there is really no mystery here. Instead, the story features Mitchell mind-reading, predicting the future, and jumping to conclusions, all while pretending that his baseless assumptions are the power of deduction. Much as Holmes leaps to the conclusion that Watson must have been in India because he has a suntan—and turns out to be correct because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have it so—Mitchell precisely guesses when and in what way Alias will perform certain acts, and what his reactions will be to certain phenomena.

The story is entertaining mostly because of the dialogue: In the key scenes, these two men arrogant men, both supposing themselves to be intellectual giants, exchange verbal barbs. Their ripostes are fun to read, but they don’t have nearly the gravity that Ottolengui apparently thought they did.