“The Deadly Pick-Up” by
Milton K. Ozaki: Gorgon Banner has just arrived in Chicago from Wisconsin, and
is driving around to familiarize himself with the city when he notices a
beautiful blonde trying to hail a taxi. He pulls to offer her a ride and she gets
in, ripping her dress as she does. But she just lives around the corner so he
tells her he’ll while she runs in and changes. She leaves a package in the seat
and rushes up to her apartment. Thirty minutes later, Gordon goes up to see
what’s taking her so long and finds her dead on the bed. Strangled. He’s sapped
behind the ear, and when he awakes there’s another girl with him. She’s Sarah
Livingston of the Livingston private detective agency, and the girl is her
sister, Lila. They discover the package contains $60,000.00 in 100 dollar
bills. The case gets more complicated when the body disappears, and Gordon
discovers two rival mobs are after the drug trade, and there was supposed to be
$200.000.00 in the package, one hundred grand for each mob boss, and people are
going to die if they don’t come up with the missing money. Plus, the police are
already looking at Gordon as a suspect in Lila’s murder. This was the first
book I ever read by Milton Ozaki, and it was fast paced, with many twists. I
wasn’t expecting the ending, at least not who the killer was.
About
Besides posting book reviews, once in a while I will be posting articles on the subject of pulps. I hope we can generate more interest for the Blog. If you would like to share an article on the pulps, you can send me a message in the Comments of a post.
Friday, February 22, 2019
Saturday, February 16, 2019
The Pulps And Their Time
THE PULPS AND THEIR TIME
Pulp magazines were originally called such because of the
pulpwood paper used to print the magazines. Frank Munsey’s ARGOSY is considered
the first of the magazines to be printed on this cheap wood paper in 1896. The
stories in the magazines ran from western to romance, mystery and science
fiction. Johnston McCulley introduced several gentlemen thieves in the early
days, including costumed Robin Hood types that robbed from the rich
crooks and gave to the poor. One of his long-lived characters was Zorro.
By the 1920s, the Roaring Twenties ushered in the gangster titles and
for the next decade the newsracks were filled with the genre.
After the Stock Market crash of ’29, the reading masses were
tired of mob rule, whether real or in their fiction. With little work, and less
money, they were no longer in the mood for gangsters in expensive suits and
flashy automobiles. Although cheap hardbacks could be bought for 8 cents,
10-cent pulps were the cheap literature for the masses. And it was those lurid
covers glaring from the pulp magazine racks that drew their attention.
Publishers recognized the trend, and in 1931 The Shadow made his debut.
He was a costumed crime fighter, patterned somewhat after McCulley’s Zorro
and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Other pulp hero characters quickly followed,
many taking the mantle of the gentleman thief, robbing from the rich crook and
giving to the poor. It was what the readers had been waiting for!
After reading Johnston McCulley’s 1913 story in TOP-NOTCH
Magazine, Force Inscrutable, I was struck by the difference in the moral
acceptance within stories from that period to the heyday of the pulps, just two
decades later. In this story, Betty Gladstone and Dick Wellington worry over
the fact that traveling together by train could be construed as immoral, since
they were only betrothed, and not married. Now jump ahead twenty years, to
1933, when Dick Wentworth (The Spider) and Nita Van Sloan are apparently
living together – betrothed but not married. In the teens, we were
treated to gentlemanly thieves, which gave way to the violent Roaring
Twenties, molls and gun rule. With the 1930s came the heroes and heroines,
who were equally as tough as the mobs, and we now saw a milder drop in the
moral appearance between men and women. This would be the ground rule for the
next two decades, until the pulps began to fade, and the age of the paperbacks
brought sex and profanity to the printed stories. It wasn’t long until the Aggressor
novels threw out all semblance of morality in the new fiction. Today’s new pulp
appears to be anchored in a mixture of the original and the modern, sometimes
difficult to recognize, but the readers in 1913 likely felt that way about the
1930s.
However, there remains a subtle difference in the original
pulp story and the stories today. Our heroes and heroines seemed more pure,
without hang-ups, and a clear vision between right and wrong. Even through the
1930s & ‘40s publishers and editors would have rejected manuscripts
outright that contained sex and profanity. Plus, it was made clear that drugs
and crime were wrong.
There were problems, of course, as every generation has them.
There was very little political correctness back then, though the editors tried
to eliminate most blatant stereotypes of minorities. Still, there was a certain
acceptance of the current views. However, the pulps entertained the racial
masses for sixty years. The heyday of the pulp heroes was from 1931 to 1953.
Twenty-two years. Which wasn’t a bad run. They gave rise to the comic book
super heroes, and the 1960s’ Aggressor paperback novels. Some of the
pulp heroes, like Doc Savage and The Shadow, are still popular
today.
I’m thrilled that the new generation is calling their work
pulp, for it means the essence of the old pulp magazines will live on. But I
certainly want to remember where my influence comes from, and honor those who
came before me.
I created The Black Ghost as
homage to The Shadow in honor of Walter Gibson, a man I greatly admired.
Perhaps The Shadow, more than any other fictional character has been my
greatest influence since I listened to his adventures on the radio as a child
in the 1940s. I met Walter Gibson in the mid 1970s, and we corresponded until
his passing. I wrote the first Black Ghost story in 1995, however he was
originally called Compere before the underworld gave him his nom-de-guarre.
His stories appeared in Clancy O’Hara’s PULP FICTION MAGAZINE. (Clancy was a
friend of Quentin Tarantino at the time, but later they parted ways.)
The Black Ghost was the name that stuck!
The
Black Ghost is set in contemporary times, as is my Man In The Black Fedora, and both seem to prove that characters
written in the pulp tradition can still be a success today. However, I do love
the classic period of the 1920s through the 1950s, and prefer my pulp reading
in those long ago times.
Whatever your preferred reading,
there is a large variety of new pulp out there. Most of it good, and worth
reading, with some excellent new writers. Give it a chance, and find special
authors to follow. Let’s face it, we love those wild pulpy action novels with
over the top heroes and heroines and blazing automatics. Long live the pulps.
Happy reading.
Monday, February 4, 2019
The Equalizer #1
The Equalizer #1: No
title. Robert McCall resigns from the Company, and hopes to re-establish his
life with his ex-wife Janice, and son Scott. But things on the home front don’t
look promising. As he’s meeting with his ex-wife Control sends an assassin to pick
him off. And Scott is deeply into music and wonders why his dad is now trying
to be a father figure for the first time in his life. As The Equalizer, McCall
has two clients in the first part of the book. Bill Hamilton works for the
telephone company, but accidentally discovered a code number that leads to the
Pentagon, and is fired. Now someone is trying to kill him. McCall asks a favor
of one of his old friends, identify the code. It appears some top people in the
telephone company are blackmailing important people, and will kill to protect
their interests. McCall’s other client is a young mother being stalked by a man
who plans on raping her. The Equalizer frightens the stalker away, but it only
pushes him over the edge, and now he not only plans on raping Colleen Randall,
but kill her also.
The second half of the book has McCall and Scott going away
for two days in a cabin in the Maine woods. But Scott rescues a young girl named Melinda
from three men. She has been raped and her friend Jake killed. He brings her to
the cabin, but is followed and the men lay siege on the cabin, cutting the phone
lines and ruining the tires on McCall’s Jaguar. McCall doesn’t have weapons,
but he’s trained on making explosives from scratch, as well as traps, something
the killers are about to learn, and Scott finally discovers more about his
father. This first novel was a fast read and fun, and taken from the TV episodes.
Friday, February 1, 2019
New Pulp Author Colleen Drippe
INTRODUCING NEW PULP
AUTHOR: Colleen Drippe
The FADING SHADOWS’ magazines
literally had hundreds of contributors turning out new pulp stories every
month, from 1995 through the end of 2004. Unfortunately, we did not collect all
of their bios at the time. Thankfully, Ginger started doing this when she was
publishing her anthology series, TALES
OF MASKS & MAYHEM. She was selecting stories from our old fiction
magazines, and decided to add author bios in the back of each issue. So,
basically, what we have here are authors that wrote for our magazines. But
elsewhere I have invited other new pulp authors to submit bios.
Colleen
Drippe: Colleen wrote mysteries and
SF, and was very prolific. She appeared in four of our magazines: CLASSIC PULP FICTION STORIES #54, 55,
57, 59, 68, 78 & 79. EXCITING UFO
STORIES #2 & 3. ALIEN WORLDS
#2, 3, 11, 19 & 33. and STARTLING
SCIENCE STORIES #11, 15, 19, 24 & 32. Since those long ago days she has
continued writing SF novels in a series of priests populating the universe.
Check out her novels, Gelen;
Freightliner; and Sunrise On the Icewolf. These are exciting action novels
in space and on other worlds.
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