Gang Pulp

Glorifying the American Goon By John Locke

Legendary editor, Harold Hersey, rose through the ranks working for publishers Street & Smith, Clayton, and Bernarr Macfadden. In late 1928, he established his own company, Magazine Publishers, popularly known as The Hersey Magazines. He called it the “Easy Credit Era”; five-thousand dollars launched the line. Thirteen titles were introduced from October 1928 through May 1929. All but two were pulps. They covered the field, from aviation to western to crime to romance, a typical “hope-for-a-winner” strategy, as Hersey put it in his 1937 book. Pulpwood Editor.

The third title introduced, with a cover date of November 1928, was The Dragnet Magazine. An above-the-title banner on the cover advertised its contents as “Detective and Crook Stories.” The cover painting was adapted from the 1928 Paramount film, Ladies of the Mob. December’s cover adapted art from another Paramount entry, 1927’s Underworld, the first in a new wave of popular gangster films. January’s cover revisited Ladies of the Mob, after which the covers sported homegrown concepts. We should further note that another Paramount gangster film. The Dragnet, was released in May 1928. So it’s quite apparent that Hersey, in New York, was attempting to mirror Hollywood’s success.

Another crime title, The Underworld, was obtained from the Eastern Distributing Corporation after its publisher, J. Thomas Wood, experienced financial difficulties. Renamed The Underworld Magazine, it debuted under the Hersey swastika seal with the issue of December ’28. Wood’s version had not been a gang pulp, however. It reprinted detective and mystery fiction from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur B. Reeve.[1] Under Hersey’s hand, it presented “new detective, gangster, and mystery stories.” the “new” assuring readers that the reprint policy was dead.

Both Dragnet and Underworld included healthy doses of gangland stories from authors like Henry Leverage, an ex-con who started his writing career in Sing Sing, Anatole Feldman, and Armitage Trail, author of the novel Scarface, basis for the 1932 gangster film. In Pulpwood Editor, Hersey barely mentions The Dragnet, but says of Underworld:

He omits Hollywood’s influence from his account. It dignifies the editor to be seen as reflecting Life itself in his work, when in fact popular culture trends were as large a calculation in creating the product.

The motivations are murky (Writer s Digest called it “agreeing to disagree”), but by the end of the summer, 1929, Hersey had resigned from Magazine Publishers, leaving it in the hands of his co-founders. Aron Wyn, an editor at Dell, was brought in to run the magazines. The chain, with about half the Hersey-created titles surviving, became known as the Ace magazines. The Underworld, still owned by Eastern Distributing, returned to the editorial control of J. Thomas Wood who continued it as an original fiction magazine. Both Dragnet and Underworld continued Hersey’s editorial policies, at least at first.

Hersey, presumably with financial backing from Macfadden, started the Good Story Magazine Company, known also as the Red Band or the Blue Band magazines for the diagonal stripe running through the cover background. In a ridiculously abbreviated time, he had the company up and running. Twelve new titles hit the newsstands with cover dates ranging from October to February 1930. Admittedly, most of the new magazines turned out to be notable obscurities: Western Outlaws, Love and War Stories, Thrills of the Jungle. Some were started as experiments, with low expectations. But in November debuted one of his greatest career successes, the first pure gang pulp, Gangster Stories. The seed he’d planted in Dragnet and Underworld now bloomed in full. Gone was the mix of conventional detective and mystery stories. Gangster gave the reader a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling underworld. Hersey had ceded the mainstream, preferring to look for his fortune on the margins. With Gangster, at least, the strategy worked. The pulp sold well — apparently about 40,000 copies per issue initially. The formula, and the success, was quickly repeated with Racketeer Stories, with a cover date of February. (For the record, a racketeer runs a bootleg liquor operation, a speakeasy, or some other illegal operation; gangsters supply the muscle.) Hersey had finally found the independent success he’d been pushing toward for nearly two decades. But life can’t be that sweet — can it — in the early days of the Depression? Something had to go wrong — and it took the form of a backlash against Gangster and Racketeer. As quickly as Hersey had gotten the magazines onto America’s newsstands, the censors pushed back.

In the remainder of this essay, we’ll explore the nature of the gang story; we’ll examine what happened, how Hersey responded, and how the pulps were affected. Additionally, the book collects nineteen stories from the first year of the gang pulps, from both before and after the controversy left its mark.

Hersey gave few editorial guidelines for the gang titles in the writers’ mags, making him unlike, on the other extreme, science-fiction editor Hugo Gernsback who provided a lengthy, detailed outline of do’s, don’ts, and philosophy. Numerous authors appear regularly in Hersey’s gang pulps, a stable of reliable wordsmiths who couId deliver the highly-specialized product on schedule. Hersey would have given prospective freelancers the standard advice: read a couple of issues to get an idea of what’s required. Today, we must follow in the footsteps of the outsiders, but, still, it’s difficult to draw a line between Hersey’s dictates and the inventiveness of his authors.

In a letter published in the June 1933 Writer’s Digest, Ralph Daigh, editor of the new (and short-lived) Nickel Detective, wrote: we don’t “care for the ‘in the groove’ gang story. That does not mean that stories with gangdom as a background are barred.” His remarks came well after the period in question, but get at the main idea. The pure gang story took gangland out of the narrative background, and made it the foreground. The main characters became gang members or close associates. The gang story broke the mold of good guys versus bad guys, by sliding the moral spectrum all to the dark side. The conflict became merely bad guys versus really bad guys. The merely bad guy played the role of the hero, of course, and claimed his dubious moral high ground through toughness, loyalty to fellow gang members, kindness to his moll. The really bad guy was the squealer, the double-crosser, the coward, the rival who violated territorial boundaries — the rat.

Gangland didn’t exist in a complete vacuum. The “civilian world” provided a stage for gang dramas to play out on; but ordinary victims of crime were rarely shown. Members of law enforcement wandered in and out of the stories. But when gangland moved to the foreground, law enforcement got shunted to the background. Often it was treated as an annoyance; the police and the detectives — the “bulls” and the “dicks” — are mere hurdles on an obstacle course. The permanent existence of the gangs was taken for granted. “Gangster’s Revenge” (The Dragnet Magazine, December 1929), for example, treats the law with brazen disregard (quoted stories are included in this collection unless otherwise noted):

In “When China Jo Lost His Woman” (Gangster Stories, November 1929), our hero, Dude Jim, instigates murder and mayhem on a grand scale at the “chop suey dive” of his rival gang boss. China Jo. Dude’s object is Jo’s girl, the alluring Half-Breed Rose. The story ends with Dude triumphant:

And life goes on with the law blissfully oblivious.

Occasionally, law enforcement characters played a central role. But not as honest servants of society. They were either taking bribes, expropriating ill-gotten gains for personal enrichment, or looking the other way. They were, in essence, de facto gang associates, making law enforcement just another racket. In “Racketeer Wages” (The Dragnet Magazine, December 1929), Detective McCarthy walks a corrupt beat:

Later, McCarthy, acquiescing to “Broadway racketeer” Hardy’s entreaty, is a willing accomplice to murder:

Thus we have a broad outline of gangland, a dark, inverted fairy-tale world where crime is the law, and the law-keepers contribute to crime. But there are many other elements to the formula:

Not surprising, the typical setting was New York City, with Chicago coming second. Some stories played up rivalries between New York and Chicago gangs, like “The ‘Eyes’ Have It,” (Gangland Stories, August-September 1930), wherein the Chi Kid comes into New York and murders the “first lieutenant to [the] overlord of New York racketeers.” Sometimes the urban setting went unnamed. Outlying settings were infrequently used, such as the Bay Area, which was accurately described in “The Singing Kid” (Gangland Stories, November 1930). A common hybrid was the air-gang story (none of which are included here) which tapped into the incredible popularity of the air pulps. Examples include “Night Clubs of the Air” (Gangster Stories, December 1929) and “A Racket in the Clouds” (Racketeer Stories, June-July 1930).

One of the most glaring elements, since it conflicts with contemporary standards, is the treatment of ethnic groups. It becomes immediately apparent that there are few actual human beings in gangland. Instead, we get familiar stereotypes. One of the main gangs is Italian:

Another central group is the Irish, although they come off pretty well in descriptions. Red Regan, in “One Hour Before Dawn,” is “the big, good natured Irishman.” Chinese gangs — tongs — were popular in the pulps before and after the gang pulp era, and they get the expected condescension:

Jewish characters make occasional appearances: Little Hymie Zeiss (“Rough on ‘Rats’ ”) (“Now when a Jew is tough and a bad egg — he’s just that. Wicked.”); and “Izzy the Yid over in Brooklyn” (“The ‘Eyes’ Have It”). Black characters appear seldom, typically in menial roles, e.g. “the nigger elevator boy” (“Guns of Gangland,” Gangster Stories, December 1929, not included).

Stereotypes were as likely to be found in descriptive passages as in dialogue, removing the defense that it was the characters speaking and not the authors themselves. In truth, it was the times talking.

The moll, the gangster’s girlfriend, or even crime partner, proves to be a major theme. Nearly all the stories feature them. Sometimes they were edgier than the men:

They could be every bit as coldblooded, like the unforgettable Kate from “Blood Thirst” (Gangland Stories, June-July 1930):

Violence, of course, was a large part of the bargain. Sometimes it was the all-out mayhem of machine guns blasting from speeding automobiles. At other times, the violence was personal and psychopathic:

Sometimes the stories built toward a violent confrontation, then delivered it with brief, and oddly poetic, passages:

Gangsters needed equipment to conduct business; for starters, a high-performance automobile:

Weapons of all sorts came in handy: sawed-off shotguns, Tommy guns; handguns, often referred to as “rods” or “gats.” High-performance was an issue here, too:

A central theme of the stories was revenge. It’s a convenient way of introducing murderous intent into the proceedings. It’s also inherent in the gang structure: to kill one gang member is to invite response from the entire gang. A number of the stories advertised the theme upfront in their titles: “Gangster’s Revenge,” “Racketeer Revenge.” Revenge was treated with such solemnity, it became a near-religious experience:

A critical element, present in every story, and also the source of much amusement today, was the heavy use of gangland lingo.

Needless to say, these randomly selected samples barely scratch the surface.

Some of the lingo found a foothold in the wider language, as this excerpt from a syndicated editorial reveals:

Lastly, as writers’ mag analysts were quick to point out, the gangster story was as closely related to the adventure story as to the mystery or detective, emphasizing action over crime detection.

So that’s the layout of gangland, more or less, and what’s wrong with that? It’s easy to view the stories today as a “guilty pleasure” — they are fun to read — or as an unclouded window onto the past. But, in their time, they carried, though not the accomplishment of literature, the power. It’s inherent in fiction that taking a character’s point of view makes that character sympathetic to some degree: as practiced by true artists of the written word, a great degree. Fiction allows us to be someone else momentarily, to live in another place or time, to see the world from an alien point of view, and thus gain understanding and a greater sense of humanity. But these gang stories represent a perversion of those purposes. By bringing gangland into the foreground, and flattening “the civilian world” to a ghosted background, gangland is redefined as the standard of normality. We hear only the voices of the gang members. The worst of us can justify any behavior, and the justification can be discovered in the argument both for and against some action. “I had to steal. I was hungry.” “I had to shoot him. He questioned my manhood.” True enough. In the pulp story, if acting out the argument in favor produces the most exciting story, then arguments against dwindle to insignificance.

This is neither to praise or condemn these stories for their socially redeeming value, or lack thereof — they’ve scarcely been read since original publication — but to get a sense of how the society of the time, other than the thrill-seekers who found the magazines entertaining, might have perceived them. Which brings up the next question: what happened?

In February 1930, Hersey’s Good Story Magazine Company was threatened with prosecution by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV). The vice that need be suppressed: Gangster Stories, which had been appearing for a few months, and Racketeer Stories, which had its first or second issue on the newsstands.

The NYSSV, with its grandiose title, sounded like a holdover from the Victorian era, which in some sense it was. Charted in 1873 by the state legislature, its mission, as stated in its annual report for 1928, was “to enforce certain laws intended to strengthen and perpetuate American standards of morality and to discourage the dissemination of publications or other matters whose effect would be to break down those standards.” The key figure in the NYSSV was executive secretary John S. Sumner, who had led the organization since 1915, succeeding its founder, Anthony Comstock. In an interview with the New York Times (October 9, 1932), Sumner described how his office operated:

Sumner’s authority was real. An October 5, 1929 report in the Times describes the seizing of 3,000 books from several New York City book dealers. The titles included books by eminent authors James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, and even a writer who appears in this collection, Clement Wood. In his groundbreaking study of censorship of the so-called “sex magazines,” Uncovered: The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulps, Douglas Ellis describes the many-years’ war of Sumner against magazine publishers. Magazines were seized by the truckload and incinerated to heat police departments. The Catholic magazine, America, described the magazine problem in appropriately dramatic terms (as quoted in a NYT article, October 29, 1929):

America praised Sumner and the Society for their valiant efforts in combating the problem.

To sum up, Sumner was likely acting on a citizen complaint against Gangster and Racketeer; and Hersey had reason to fear. But what possible law was he breaking? There were some frighteningly glamorous molls in the gang pulps, but no real sex.

Sumner had “exhumed,” in the terms of Lemuel F. Parton’s syndicated report (February 21/22, 1930), a thirty-year old state law that banned “magazines devoted to or chiefly made up of bloodshed, lust or crime.” Sumner’s description of the problem was that “Gangsters always triumph at the end of the adventures described in both magazines”; adding, “I especially resent the women who lead the gangs.” So maybe it was about sex... In all probability, there was much more about the stories that bothered Sumner, but these brief quotes are what percolated into the public record.

Good Story’s attorney, Joseph Schultz, conceded that the gang pulps met the law’s definition, but that the law was unconstitutional. He was probably right, though we can only speculate as to how 1930’s courts might have ruled. But right or wrong, challenging the law was an expense Hersey likely never seriously considered.

The magazines were distributed nationally, and the story of Sumner’s threat received national coverage, although of a minor sort. Hersey made it one-day news by pulling the magazines out of New York state — or promising to. Schultz pointed out that there was no Federal equivalent of the New York statute, the magazines would continue, and that New York “does not mean much in the bulk of their circulation.” The last part sounds like bravado. There’s no reason to believe that America’s most populous city (and state) would not have been a significant market for magazines with, essentially, New York stories.

We should also note that Hollywood suffered its own “crime problem” in early ’29. The industry dug into its deep pockets and produced a criminological study authored by a former governor of Maine, which demonstrated that the villain in films always got what was coming to him. Schultz echoed the argument: “In these [gang pulp] stories, the villain always gets the worst of it — as all villains should.” As you will discover in reading through these collected stories, Schultz was sugarcoating his client’s problem — as all lawyers should. The censors may have been tilting against windmills, but they weren’t inaccurate in their charges.

Underlying the backlash was a widespread fear that gang pulps promoted criminal behavior among the young; the same argument being made about video games today, violent movies in the ’60s, rock and roll in the ’50s, sharpened sticks in the Pleistocene, etc. The attitude is reflected in this humorous item from Joseph Van Raalte’s syndicated column, Bo Broadway (February 16, 1931):

In a September 1930 Writer’s Digest piece, “The NEW Gangster Story,” Joseph Lichtblau sided with the analysis of the censors (the article is reprinted in full in this volume):

Lichtblau suggests a historical sweep not justified by magazines that had been on the newsstands less than two years at the time of his writing; not quite enough time for masses of youths to pass from wide-eyed boyhood to corrupted incarceration. But Lichtblau raises the question of what Hersey’s target age group might have been for the gang pulps. One doesn’t read these delectably vile stories and think, “great entertainment for kids!”; but at the same time it’s extremely difficult from a modern perspective to determine what an average educated adult, a working-class reader of the pulps, or an adolescent, might have considered acceptable entertainment in 1930.

In Pulpwood Editor, Hersey confirms that he considered young readers part of the audience, and addresses the corruption question:

Hersey also addressed the age-group question from an oblique angle:

We introduce this quote because Hersey’s gang pulps rank among the worst-edited, most ungrammatical fiction in all of the pulps. For all his fame as an editor, Hersey seemed to apply little or no effort to smoothing out what is often execrably rough prose. Sentences are poorly constructed; sometimes the narrative meanders for paragraphs before the action becomes apparent; often, the irrational punctuation wouldn’t pass a third-grade exam. And, to make it even harder on the reader, there are the kind of errors that can be attributed to the drinking habits of the typesetter. We’ve exercised a light touch in cleaning up the stories for reprint, simply to improve readability problems; but some stories were considered too laborious to decipher and rejected for inclusion (we do have standards).

At any rate, a direct link between gang pulps and youth crime will not be proven nor disproven here, or anywhere else — which makes it a perfect subject to argue over — and we’ll leave it at that.

Not everyone took Sumner seriously. While the New York Herald Tribune made the attack on Gangster and Racketeer a front-page item, The Hartford Courant consigned the story to a humor column, The Lighter Side (February 20, 1930):

There’s no question that the gang pulps had crossed a threshold, but the Courant highlighted the challenge facing any censor, that of defining the problem so that it targets only the offending material, and not some similar, inoffensive material. Could New York’s law have been amended to add a “lovable rogue” exception?

In Pulpwood Editor (1937), Hersey defended the gang pulps. He neglected to mention Sumner, but contradicted his main objection:

His defense, as we’ve already determined, is definitely not applicable to the stories published before the controversy hit. Underworldlings did triumph over justice. Perhaps the purest example is “One Hour Before Dawn” (Gangster Stories, December 1929). Mob boss Jim Regan is doing time in the Big House. Meanwhile, his associate, Italian Joe Mercurio, has taken Regan’s moll, and obtained a small fortune from a crime Regan had carefully planned. Regan bribes his way out of prison, and reclaims the girl and the money. At the end of the story, the happy couple looks forward to living on “easy street,” on “the continent,” with no expectation that the law will ever catch up to them.

Hersey’s defense, however, does apply to stories published immediately post-controversy. He chose to adjust the product rather than battle New York’s anti-blood lust law in court. Apparently, some accommodation was reached with Sumner. The explicit terms of the agreement are not available to us but the deal itself was mentioned, for instance, in Lichtblau’s article: “in New York City, particularly, [Hersey’s] magazines were forbidden on the stands until he agreed to change them radically.” Hersey described the stakes in Pulpwood Editor: “I faced a legal battle that could be renewed with every succeeding issue which would cost me far more than I could make by selling the magazine in New York City.” Neither Gangster nor Racketeer missed a monthly issue during this period; whether the magazines were distributed in New York without interruption is a separate issue.

Theoretically, we could read stories from multiple issues and determine the dateline that separates pre- and post-censorship issues. Fortunately, we don’t have to do that — fortunately, because the differences between pre- and post- stories are sufficiently ambiguous to provoke a lot of head scratching. There are clearer indications in the magazines. In the February 1930 issue of Gangster, Hersey ran a one-page feature titled, “Editorial by the Publisher,” which justified the stories, and spoke about them in elevated terms:

Not only was Gangster Stories in a class with the classics, it was educational, and might even protect the reader from denizens of the underworld! The February Racketeer had a similar editorial titled, “A Page From the Publisher’s Notebook.” featuring this passage:

It’s clear that this editorial was written after the one in Gangster. First, Hersey zeroes in on Sumner’s objection — the triumph of the criminal — and addresses it. The earlier editorial in Gangster suggests that Hersey knew trouble was brewing, and anticipated that merely depicting racketeers and gangsters was the problem. Second, all issues of Hersey gang pulps into the late summer carried an editorial titled “A Page From the Publisher’s Notebook.” That the first entry in Gangster carried a generic title suggests a feature in embryo.[2]

In general, a pulp, like most magazines, would come out with a cover date from one of the two following months, so that they would never appear outdated on the newsstand. Good Story had nine titles with February dates (three titles were already defunct). But Hersey would have issued the nine over several weeks, so the precise date a particular title came out is almost impossible to determine without access to the publisher’s or distributor’s records which, needless to say, we don’t have. The timing is critical because Sumner’s threat to prosecute hit the newspapers on February 20.

The March issue of Gangster did, in fact, address Sumner’s objections, as we would expect:

Going by plausible dates, Hersey had to have reacted in advance of the actual problem. In Pulpwood Editor, he confirms he’d been warned ahead of time. So, putting it all together, this may be what happened: Hersey caught wind of the trouble coming in January. He added the editorial to the February Gangster at the last minute, not only to head off Sumner, but to inoculate the magazines against potential copycat complaints in other states (though laws like New York’s proved to be rare). He learned what Sumner’s objections were in time to add the modified editorial to the February Racketeer. He withdrew both pulps from distribution in New York until the crisis was resolved, which it was not on February 20, according to the news coverage. He entered into negotiations with Sumner. Sumner does not prefer a court battle since he, too, has a budget, and bigger fish to fry. He may even have shown flexibility, allowing Hersey to use up his purchased inventory of stories in return for a good-faith promise to comply with the law thenceforth. Under this scenario, both titles would have missed at least one month of New York distribution, and there will be no distinct line separating the pre- and post-censorship stories.

Hersey’s editorials became increasingly melodramatic in tone, such as this passage from Racketeer, March 1930:

At times he sounded more Catholic than the Pope in his distaste for gangland (Gangster Stories, April 1930):

As time went by, Hersey seemed stuck for new ways of expressing the same idea. By the August issue of Racketeer, the editorials had run their course. In that issue, Hersey talked up the new expanded size of the magazines, then added his “crime does not pay” comments as a coda. After that, the editorials disappear, as Hersey must have considered the crisis over.

Another feature was added to Gangster with the April issue. It was a column, titled Gangland that reprinted news stories about gangsters getting caught up with the law or coming to a bad end. Like the editorials, it was counter-programming for people offended by the stories; perhaps part of a legal defense strategy, in case needed. Gangland ran as a regular feature, then showed up in Racketeer with the November issue. We reprint the entire April column here as a representative sample.

Then, of course, there are the stories to consider in evaluating Hersey’s actions. An odd one is “Kid Dropper Plays It Alone,” from the February Racketeer. By virtue of the editorial, this should be considered a post-censorship issue. The story uses a bulletproof vest as a gimmick. The vest saves the Dropper in a shootout. But he’s picked up by the cops wearing the vest. Irony of ironies, the vest that saved him will now be the evidence that dooms him. But the cops confiscate his weapons, never see the vest, and inexplicably set him free. End of story and — huh? The ironic and natural conclusion would have satisfied Sumner’s objections, but that’s not the conclusion we get, even though the ending could have been Sumner-proofed with little effort. That shows the blurry line between the pre- and post-, and further suggests that this issue was not distributed in New York.

In “City of Bullets” (Gangster Stories, April 1930), gang leader Mike Regan lethally vanquishes his rival mobsters. The story ends with him raising a toast to his moll. It sounds like it would be offensive to the arbiters of morality, but this may actually be a “legal” post-censorship story. There were very few published guidelines for gang stories from any publisher, but according to a September 1930 Writer’s Digest freelance solicitation for Detective-Dragnet (formerly The Dragnet Magazine): “The gangster must not triumph over the law. However, when gang meets gang — either may win.” This may have been the core of Hersey’s agreement with Sumner. Aron Wyn, the listed editor of Detective-Dragnet, would have been all too aware of the controversy. In fact, The Dragnet changed title to Detective-Dragnet with the April 1930 issue, undoubtedly to shed some of Hersey’s taint. It also dropped the “Detective and Gangster Stories” banner from the front cover, though it retained it above the table of contents.

Gangster and Racketeer sold well enough that Hersey added two more gang titles in the summer of ’30, both debuting with June-July issues. He was apparently determined to guarantee that supply met, if not exceeded, demand. He may also have been concerned with competition from the new Popular Publications, which had promised that a gangster pulp would be among their initial titles. Hersey’s two new titles were Gangland Stories and Mobs, which were essentially similar. (Mobs ran only two issues, while Gangland continued into 1932. Our theory is that Hersey wanted one new gang pulp but couldn’t decide on a title. He tested the market with two and stayed with the best seller.)

That bit of background aside, Gangland’s second issue (August-September) contains one of the best examples of a story that seems rewritten to comply with the law, the sadistic “The ‘Eyes’ Have It.” The New York gangs have established Fat Siler’s speakeasy as a no-warfare zone. Into this oasis of peace wanders a “congenital killer” called the Chi Kid, from the other gang capital. He murders a drunk and belligerent racketeer who all the New Yorkers know to ignore. This starts a violent contest between the Chi Kid and the boss of bosses, Martin Farrell. A gun duel provides a fitting climax. The natural narrative thrust of the story is that because he broke the peace, the Chi Kid will come to a bad end at the hand of Farrell, a happy end to bracket the happy opening. Paradise regained. However, after the call to “fire” during the duel, the story cuts away to a news story which reports that that both men were shot and killed simultaneously, and that Farrell’s gang was quickly rounded up. The ending may have satisfied the censors, but it betrays the narrative and thus leaves a bad taste.

By contrast, “The Singing Kid,” in the November Gangland, integrates the police presence through the length of the narrative, so that when the Kid is brought to justice at the conclusion, it feels like a natural, not forced, event. It reads like a story that was written with the editorial and legal requirements firmly in mind. A similar example is “A Long Chance” (Racketeer Stories, June-July 1930). A detective is well-entrenched in the narrative; he eventually brings the protagonist-thieves to justice, closing with the observation, “All crooks are so damn dumb.” The only catch is that the detective is crooked, using his badge to coerce the female thief, and confiscating stolen money for himself. He doesn’t come to justice, but apparently, that wasn’t a problem.

Did the censors have a long-term effect? “Glycerined Gangsters” (Racketeer Stories, November 1930) recounts another mob war, with one gang prevailing after creating horrendous public mayhem and a trail of carnage. At the end, the gangster and his moll embrace in their car, while a passing beat cop warns them, “No petting parties allowed! Move on!” It’s a light, comical follow-up to some very heavy violence, and strongly implies the law’s impotence, quite similar to the pre-censorship story, “When China Jo Lost His Woman.” It raises the question of whether Sumner’s threat made a permanent difference.

We can point to a ripple effect through the industry. Publishers were put on guard. As mentioned, when Hersey came under fire, Ace quickly changed the title of The Dragnet to Detective-Dragnet and de-emphasized gangster stories on the cover. The Underworld retained the same mix of detective and gangster stories, but we weren’t able to examine any issues for further details. A February 1932 solicitation blurb for Underworld in Writer s Digest read: “We do not want stories that glorify the gangster. It is best to observe the rule of ‘Crime Doesn’t Pay.’ ”

Black Mask is the best-remembered crime pulp of the day, and in a September 1930 letter in Writer’s Digest, editor Joseph Shaw weighed in on the gang-story question and showed himself to be the anti-Hersey:

Another pulp that eschewed the pure gang story was The Shadow, as revealed by this excerpt from a May 1933 Writer’s Digest solicitation blurb: “Gangster stories are not wanted — that is, stories which center about gangsters themselves. The officers can match their wits against gangsters, but the gangsters must always be shown up for unlawful citizens, and fittingly punished.”

The paucity of examples demonstrates how difficult it is to get a clear picture of behind-the-scenes editorial policy.

On April 4, 1930, while on a cross-country trip to check up on business, Hersey stopped in Denver to visit his friend, Willard E. Hawkins, editor of Author & Journalist, which had published a number of articles by Hersey in 1927 and ’28. Soon after arriving, his hotel room was accosted by reporters asking about the Gangster Stories controversy. Hersey later visited the A & J offices, then attended a luncheon where he addressed a gathering of local writers. His talk was interrupted by two officials from the District Attorney’s office who determined that he was the publisher of Gangster Stories, then whisked him away, ostensibly to see the D.A. Instead, he was taken to the jail, stripped, searched, and put into a cell. A deeply regretful Hawkins came to visit him, and offered to procure a lawyer. After three hours of incarceration, Hersey was ushered into a courtroom. The judge charged him with publishing magazines that corrupted the young. Gangster Stories was the evidence. Witnesses testified to damage inflicted upon youthful readers in their charge. As a result, Hersey was held over for trial with bail set at $25,000. As he left the courtroom, he was approached by western pulpster, Ray Humphries, whose day-job was in the D.A.’s office. Upon his greeting the assemblage burst into laughter. It had all been an elaborate practical joke planned by Humphries. Court officers, the D.A.’s office, the jail warden, were all in on it, though many of the spectators were not. The complete story is far more detailed; Hersey recounts it in Chapter XIII of Pulpwood Editor. It’s all part of Hersey’s brief notoriety.

The gang pulp era continued several years for Hersey. After he added

^{The Author & Journalist, November 1930}

Gangland Stories and Mobs, he inaugurated Prison Stories with the November 1930 issue. It lasted six issues. Compete Gang Novel Magazine was introduced in March 1931. It produced ten issues over little more than a year. Another gang-variant was Speakeasy Stories, “strictly on the side of the law but laid in the haunts of the underworld,” inaugurated April-May 1931. It lasted four issues. In November-December 1931 came New York Stories, which was not about gangsters but marginally in the same class, featuring the same authors as the gang pulps. Three issues. In 1932, two of the pulps merged to form Racketeer and Gangland Stories — the beginning of the end. Starting in May, it lasted three issues. Gangster’s last issue was November 1932, but that followed a four-month gap. In February 1933, Hersey issued Greater Gangster Stories, which reprinted old Gangster stories before returning to original material. It lasted thirteen issues, its last dated May 1934.

Other publishers got into the act. Popular Publications, as promised, issued Gang World. They published 25 issues from October 1930 to November 1932. Eventually, another company published it for seven issues spanning 1933 and ’34. In late ’31, Popular experimented with Underworld Romances, “clean stories of love and adventure in the world of crime.” It only produced four issues. Gun Molls Magazine, from Real Publications, zeroed in on what really mattered in its choice of subject matter. It lasted 19 issues, from October 1930 to April 1932. There were other stragglers in ensuing years, but they fall out of the late-Prohibition gang-pulp era. Prohibition was officially repealed in 1933. This is often blamed for the demise of the gang pulps, but they’d really run their course as a viable entertainment medium before then. As in any narrowly-defined genre, the challenge is in maintaining variety, and the gang pulps certainly didn’t attract the most creative writers.

Even as the gang pulps slowly became irrelevant, opposition reared up on occasion. In the May 1931 editorial, “Gangster Stories of Today Are Successors of the Dime Novels” (cited above re: Chicago sundaes), columnist Frederic J. Haskin shares his disdain for the form:

On July 28, 1932, the Chicago City Council introduced a resolution urging the suppression of crime magazines:

Hersey could only have dreamed of circulations into seven figures. No doubt, the resolution went the way of most resolutions: into the noble memories file. Gangster pulps may have fizzled out, hut detective and crime pulps remain with us in one form or another.

In the grand history of censorship in the 20th Century, the attack on the gang pulps barely merits a footnote (the footnote you’re now reading). The original magazines are extremely scarce, and precious few of the stories have ever been reprinted. Thus, there has been only a vague notion of what the magazines contain, among the relatively few people who even know they existed. So how could we regret losing, because of censorship, that which we barely remember?

In an interesting coincidence, the infamous Hollywood Production Code (PC) was adopted by the film studios on March 31, 1930, a variance measured in weeks from when Hersey reached his accommodation with Sumner. Hersey’s agreement, like the PC, was a form of self-censorship: We agree to restrict ourselves in order that retribution is not delivered upon us. The PC is best-remembered for its restrictions on sexual issues, adultery, nudity, rape, deviance, and sex itself. But it also addressed crime scenarios. Its restrictions in that category are a virtual catalog of what could be found in the gang pulps: “criminals should not be made heroes”; “brutal killings should not be presented in detail”; “killings for revenge should not be justified”; “law and justice must not by the treatment they receive from criminals be made to seem wrong or ridiculous”; “crime need not always be punished, as long as the audience is made to know that it is wrong.” The PC, though, was skirted as quickly as it was adopted: thus creating the “pre-Code era” that lasted into 1934, when the Code was finally observed in earnest. We wonder if Hersey’s agreement with Sumner did not, in its own way, produce a half-hearted standard, giving the reader the same product of revenge and violence bundled up in a chaste wrapping; analogous to a later generation of pornographic books advertised as “marriage manuals.” The “packaging” may pacify outsiders, but the true consumers know better.

Reading these gang stories, and looking for evidence of pre- and post-censorship content, can be a puzzling experience, at times the imperfect science of reading tea leaves. The distinctions can be subtle to the modern eye, as jaded as we are to depictions of violence in print, film, or on television news. But understanding the cloud of scrutiny the stories were published under gives them another level of intelligibility all the same (assuming the rocky prose cooperates).

In 1930, Harold Hersey elected not to defend his constitutional rights — for perfectly understandable reasons. Though the Bill of Rights grants freedom freely, enforcing it can be very expensive, indeed. When Hersey reduced the conflict to a one-day news story, he guaranteed that the affair would soon be forgotten and that its inner details would never be public. That allowed him, whether from intent or selective memory, to claim in Pulpwood Editor: “I was careful never to permit an underworldling to triumph over justice.” Because the magazines themselves were unavailable, his brief account became the prism through which future historians of the pulps would characterize his gang-story magazines. We hope, with this volume, to have corrected the record to the extent possible.