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Tag: pulp

  • December 25th, 2012 9:12pm

    It could have been a lot of things,“ I said. "Maybe the police were called because somebody was sick. Maybe the two men in the plain car were doctors. Maybe our neighbor thought he saw a prowler. I guess if we really wanted to find out the thing to do would be to ask him.”

    The next evening I got in the car and drove down the road to do just that.

    “It’s because I’m a burglar,” our neighbor answered me amiably.
    I stood there and blinked, twice. I’d introduced myself when he’d answered the door, and he’d introduced himself as Jack Hogan and invited me inside and offered me a drink. After a few minutes’ exploratory conversation with the tanned and handsome man, I’d gotten around to asking him about the commotion at his house we’d witnessed last night, offering our help if anything was wrong.

    “The police were just here to harass me,” Jack Hogan went on. “Lieutenant Faber and his friends. I humor the lieutenant because I understand he acts only out of frustration.”

    “But if you’re innocent -” I said in a rather dumbfounded way.
    “But I’m not innocent,” Hogan said freely, his gray eyes as sincere as his voice. “Though if you tell anyone I said so I’ll deny it. Lieutenant Faber knows I’m guilty, but he can’t do anything about it because I’m too smart for him. That’s the fun of it.”

    — So Young, So Fair, So Dead by John Lutz

  • December 21st, 2012 8:32pm

    Ferris had lost some of his erectness. He wet his lips and said, “I want to see my lawyer. I don’t want to talk till I’ve seen my lawyer.”

    Spade said, “It’s all right with me. You’re up against it, but I don’t like blackmailers myself. I think Eli wrote a good epitaph for them in that book back there – "Too many have lived.”

    — Too Many Have Lived by Dashiell Hammett

  • December 20th, 2012 1:52pm

    There were literally hundreds of such often live-by-night magazines with wildly exotic and frequently misleading names from their initial appearance at the beginning of the 1920’a in America. And I would not pretend that everything they published was made of gold. Far from it. We are talking commercial fiction, mostly catering to the lowest common denominator. But then do our modern paperbacks have loftier ambitions and superior hit-rate, quality-wise?

    But what makes them stand out is the fact that the pulps had one golden rules which unsung editors insisted upon and good and bad writers alike religiously followed: adherence to the art of storytelling. Every story in the pulps had a beginning and and end, sharply-etched economical characterization, action, emotions, plenty going on. The mission was to keep the reader hooked, to transport him/her into a more interesting world of fantasy and make-believe, spiriting them away from the drab horizons of everyday life (remember, there was no television in those very early days,or CDs or other modern leisure addictions).

    — Maxim Jakubowski (in the introduction to  The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction)