The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

INTRODUCTION Maxim Jakubowski

There is no such thing as pulp fiction.

Sweeping assertion, hey?

And, I suppose, a perfect touch of controversy to open a volume which I hope you will find full of surprise, action, shocks galore, sound and fury, pages bursting with all the exhilarating speed and bumps of a rollercoaster ride.

Which is what all the best storytelling provides.

So long live pulp fiction!

First, let’s bury the myth that pulp fiction is a lower form of art, the reverse side of literature as we know it. Until pyrotechnic film director Quentin Tarantino spectacularly hijacked the expression, most ignorant observers and accredited denizens of the literary establishment relegated pulp writing to a dubious cupboard where we parked the guilty pleasures we were too ashamed to display in public. Pulp was equated with rubbish. Crap of the basest nature. How arrogant of them to dismiss thus what, for many, was a perfect form of entertainment!

What we have come to call, to know as, pulp writing came about from the magazines where much of its early gems first appeared: the colourful publications, so often afflicted with endearing but terrible names, which cheapskate publishers insisted on printing on the cheapest available form of paper, pulp paper; sadly this is another reason for the aura that now surrounds them, as so few have survived the onslaught of time and decay, and the rare remaining examples have become increasingly collectable, albeit all too often in crumbling form on the shelves.

Many of the names have gone down in legend: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces, Thrills of the Jungle, High Seas Adventures, Fighting Aces, Secret Service Operator 5, etc . . . to the nth degree. 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 1920s 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 a superior hit-rate, quality-wise?

But what makes them stand out is the fact that the pulps had one golden rule 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 an end, sharply etched economical characterization, action, emotions, plenty going on. The mission was to keep the reader hooked, to transport him into a more interesting world of fantasy and make-believe, spiriting him 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).

This compact with the consumer might appear self-evident, and was indeed very much a continuation of the Victorian penny dreadfuls and novels written by instalments in newspapers and magazines by the likes of Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens and so many other overlooked pioneer scribes just a few decades earlier, but it is a tradition that has sadly since been lost to the trappings of Literature with a capital L and pretension. We now have partly forgotten the pleasures of old-time radio but at least the pulp magazines have left us with millions of words of splendid, lurid, cheap and exciting writing. And not only does this inheritance still afford much pleasure but it can also be said to have influenced many commercial writers practising their art long after the literal disappearance of the pulp magazines due to wartime paper shortages. The spirit of pulp continued unabated after the war and ended in the pages of the paperback books that took over the literacy baton in England and America. The 1950s were in fact a further golden age for pulp writing, with the exploding paperback market opening opportunities by the dozen as imprints mushroomed and thrived, providing fertile ground for the remaining pulp survivors and newer generations of popular writers, many of whom, particularly in the fields of mystery and science-fiction writing, would go on to better things and, eventually, to the respectability of the hardcover book. Many of these authors were also busy contributing to the renaissance of popular genre magazines now in digest format, with tales that often echoed or prefigured their novels, and are represented in this selection.

This anthology restricts itself to crime and mystery stories in the pulp tradition. Strictly speaking, of course, the pulp magazines ventured further afield, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror, spy tales, aviation yarns, spicy stories (that would not make even a maiden blush today), jungle capers, westerns and a pleasing variety of superheroes like The Shadow, Doc Savage, the Spider and other masked and unmasked crusaders. But tales of noir streets, gorgeous molls and shady villains fighting ambiguous sleuths and dubious heroes are the archetypes that represent pulp writing at its best.

There are very few popular fiction magazines left alive today and those there are tend to prefer a more refined type of tale, but still pulp fiction survives in the writings of many authors. Because pulp fiction is a state of mind, a mission to entertain, and literature would be so much poorer without it, its zest, its speed and rhythm, its unashamed verve and straightforward approach to storytelling.

However long the present anthology might be, I regret it couldn’t be ten times longer. The pulp magazines and writers and their successors are still unknown territory and the brave researcher with time on his hands could, I am confident, mine so much more from these yellowing pages and honour even more forgotten writers and give them their five minutes in the sun. As it is there are so many writers it wasn’t possible to include here, for reasons of space or availability of rights. In no particular order: Ed McBain (as Evan Hunter and Richard Marsten), Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Andrew Vachss, Loren D. Estleman, Carroll John Daly, Brett Halliday, Raoul Whitfield, Mark Timlin, Richard Prather, Leigh Brackett, Erle Stanley Gardner (pre Perry Mason), James Ellroy, Clark Howard, Max Brand. In addition, rising paper costs prevented me from making this volume even heavier, as I had to withdraw material by Ed Gorman, James Reasoner, Ed Lacy, Frank Gruber, Loren D. Estleman, Derek Raymond, Robert Edmond Alter, Frederick C. Davis and Jonathan Craig – so look out for these names elsewhere. They are certainly worth a detour. But the list could be endless. Check them all out. Thrills absolutely guaranteed.

The stories selected span seven decades of popular writing, from Dashiell Hammett to current masters like Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block. In between you will find the great names of yesteryear and familiar bylines from the paperback world. Enjoy the forbidden thrills. And when you have turned over the final page, I just know you will repeat after me: pulp fiction will never die.

Almost 18 years after the initial publication of The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction, we return with a revised edition and truly the appeal of pulp fiction has not diminished one iota in the intervening years. Readers and fans are still endlessly fascinated by these hardboiled stories of times past, tough guys and pliant femmes fatales and the tradition vigorously continues in movies and the books of more contemporary writers who carry the flame onwards against all the tides of fashion.

Pulp fiction remains the stuff of dreams and still captures the sense of wonder in our collective imagination and, in the process, supplies first-class entertainment and thrills.

Eight stories from the initial volume have been deleted to make place for nine tales, many of which make their first appearance in book form since their initial publication in long-forgotten if legendary magazines. Most are by authors who are now long forgotten but measure up honourably to all the big names of noir and pulp and are well worth rediscovering.

In addition, we take great pride in presenting what we believe is a lost story by Dashiell Hammett. ‘The Diamond Wager’ was recently unearthed by hardy internet detectives and doesn’t appear in any of Hammett’s bibliographies, but we are convinced it was written by the great man of pulp himself under the somewhat transparent pseudonym of Samuel Dashiell (his birth certificate was actually bylined Samuel Dashiell Hammett). Further it has been established that between 1926 and 1927 he did work for Samuel’s Jewelers of San Francisco, just a couple of years before the story appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly! Strong evidence indeed.

Long live pulp!