Pulp Fiction Sperging

[Alexander Thaut]

I grew up on a lot of pulp fiction or "adjacent" stuff, like dime novels, Sherlock Holmes, Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon, etc. In the '00s, you could find a LOT on pulps being preserved and it seemed like every week there was some new autist that was scanning a few stories.

What are Pulps? It's fiction printed in these cheap pulpy-papered magazines from around 1920 to 1960? The precursor's the Dime Novel. The successor is likely the cheap paperback. Pulps formerly had a more negative connotation as literature for the masses, but it's gone to the wayside as quite a lot of prominent writers got their start in the biz. (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein are the big ones that come to mind. Agatha Christie also started off as one, I believe. Edgar Rice Burroughs also counts as a pulp writer and Tarzan has pretty much been the iconic jungle hero for over a century)

Now, a lotta folks are gonna maybe be familiar with the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and all that. Or maybe you're a comics fan that isn't a redditor, then you're also likely familiar with the proto-superhero types like The Shadow and Doc Savage. Me? Personally, I enjoyed all of them, except for the romance/smut stuff. I grew up guzzling every reprint, archived txt/pdf, and even went to go find the old time radio shows based on pulp material. There's just something immensely enoyable about the style. Even the stuff that was a bit more off the beaten path, like historical fiction pulps, were still hella enjoyable.

Now, my assorted thoughts on pulps or pulp adjacent stuff via genre.

Detectives/Mysteries-

• James Bond's fun, but I also wound up acquiring most of the Bulldog Drummond books for cheap as a kid and that was sort of the big iconic british spy-detective hero before Bond iirc.
• There's a surprisingly large amount of fun "secret agent", "G-Man", and FBI agent pulp stories from back in the day when they were viewed in a positive light. I don't think the stories went too deeply into kvetching about civil liberties being broken.
• Hard Boiled detectives are always fun, but the one discussion I've had with a lot of old folks or pulp fans seems to come to "Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe?".

Adventure

• I genuinely don't know why modern folk bitch about muh racism when looking at older works set in an exoticized place. I'll go read something like a Doc Savage story or some shit and then all that happens is describing an ethnically diverse combatant being savage and brutal (yeah yeah, jungle niggers, natives, russians, etc). Like, yeah, you're gonna get lines drawn. It's this bullshit critical theory and media literacy globohomo bullshit where they want to repeatedly point out something is racist/etc in some kinda circlejerk that doesn't do anything beyond reiterate the same thing.
  • You think Short Round from Indiana Jones was racist? That's the shit they put in the kids books like Tom Swift.
• I think the Allan Quatermain stories are fine, but they feel a bit slow to read and the later ones are a bit schizo.
• Tarzan and related books are alright reading, but it's jarring when I remember the more cleaned up films/cartoons versus the Tarzan books being rather weird at times.

Sci-Fi

• I genuinely think it's amusing how every major "sci-fi" superhero really seems to be inspired by pulps or pulp-adjacent stuff like Wylie's Gladiator. It seems that once we had creators that didn't have some respect for the pulps or older comics, then we kinda wound up with pure slop that hated the fans. I haven't read the Lensmen stuff yet, so I'm wondering how it compares with the Green Lantern mythos.

Fantasy

• I find myself intrigued by how many fucking "Occult Detective" types there were in pulp fiction. I'm surprised this specific subgenre never became bigger in our pop culture. Like, it eventually sorta led to shit like Buffy and Supernatural, I guess? But I think it'd have been interesting to see something like a '40s or '50s adaptation of something in this subgenre.
  • To be fair, I never read a ton of these stories. I did read Carnacki though.
• Are there any pulp sword and sandal/planet writers/series/stories that go under the radar? I've been meaning to re-read all of Robert E Howard's stuff and to start on Fafnir and the Grey Mouser sometime this year. I'm aware of Moorcock's and Karl Wagner's work and would consider picking it all up eventually.

I've found myself looking up the H. Bedford Jones Jimgrim stories as well as Harold Lamb's "steppes quartet" books. They're on my list. So is Manly Wade Wellman's work.



What kinda pulps do you guys recommend that aren't part of the well-known paths. What are your favorites? Should they be more well-known?

 

[skykiii]

You just know people are going to read this title and think its about the movie Pulp Fiction, not the literary genre.

Also maybe I just missed it but I didn't see mention of The Shadow anywhere.

 

[Toolbox]

You just know people are going to read this title and think its about the movie Pulp Fiction, not the literary genre.

Also maybe I just missed it but I didn't see mention of The Shadow anywhere.

Right here. v

Or maybe you're a comics fan that isn't a redditor, then you're also likely familiar with the proto-superhero types like The Shadow and Doc Savage.

Not a guy that's read any of the stuff, but seems interesting.

 

[skykiii]

Right here. v

Not a guy that's read any of the stuff, but seems interesting.

I'll admit I'm more familiar with the radio show. I think I tried to read one of the pulp books but for some reason didn't finish it.

Doc Savage I liked for just how ridiculous the books could get ("Hey, the bad guy might be watching me expecting this blimp I'm in to crash in flames... I better be blowing a flamethrower while gradually descending on the off-chance he's watching!") Stuff like that is just so much fun.

One thing I miss is how comparatively fast-moving these books could be, compared to today when a novelist will take six hundred pages to tell a forty page story. Like Lensman's first five chapters alone would be a full novel today.

(And I mean the actual first Lensman novel, Galactic Patrol... Doc Smith pulled a proto-George Lucas later and tried to make prequels, one of which was literally just a rewrite of another book, but I've always been told its best to ignore these).

 

[Alexander Thaut]

You just know people are going to read this title and think its about the movie Pulp Fiction, not the literary genre.

Also maybe I just missed it but I didn't see mention of The Shadow anywhere.

He's mentioned.

Yeah, I feel like the context of this being in this sub forum is a good clue that it ain't about the movie. Hopefully.

Right here. v

Not a guy that's read any of the stuff, but seems interesting.

The Shadow is legitimately a fun time with a great radio show. The radio show's in public domain, but the stories are harder to find iirc. I've just barely managed to find them all myself on some site because internet archive decided to remove the complete collection from public. The stories are all very atmospheric, the action's very descriptive, and they don't have political correctness.


Hell, The Spider, The Phantom Detective, G-8, etc. All fun stuff.

I'll admit I'm more familiar with the radio show. I think I tried to read one of the pulp books but for some reason didn't finish it.

Doc Savage I liked for just how ridiculous the books could get ("Hey, the bad guy might be watching me expecting this blimp I'm in to crash in flames... I better be blowing a flamethrower while gradually descending on the off-chance he's watching!") Stuff like that is just so much fun.

One thing I miss is how comparatively fast-moving these books could be, compared to today when a novelist will take six hundred pages to tell a forty page story. Like Lensman's first five chapters alone would be a full novel today.

(And I mean the actual first Lensman novel, Galactic Patrol... Doc Smith pulled a proto-George Lucas later and tried to make prequels, one of which was literally just a rewrite of another book, but I've always been told its best to ignore these).

Doc Savage is fun. The hero is a super-scientific ubermensch that adheres to a strict code, but he also believes that brain surgery can remove evil from men's minds, so he sends all the bad guys to a place upstate.

The 5 sidekicks and 1 girl were all fun. Monk and Ham's constant fucking banter and jokes. Their fucking pets (Habeus Corpus, a pig, and Chemistry, a monkey). Johnny Littlejohn's overly wordy dialogue. I remember Renny and Long Tom werent' as memorable as Monk and Ham. But, by god, the writer was able to make each of these characters come to life. Lester Dent reminded us all the damned time that Monk was a gorilla of a man that was actually a leading chemist. But he did it in such a fun way.

Hell the Conan stories or Lovecraft stories didn't spend 500 pages telling a story. They did what they did very well with the purpose of being genuinely entertaining. Even in the case of like, the "novel" length stories (Doc Savage, Shadow, etc.), they were like what, 80-120 pages at most?

Doc Smith is someone I wanna read eventually.

 

[Swiss46]

I read the first Grey Mouser book this year and I really liked the magic in it being creepy ritual stuff used to fuck with the protagonists. Favorite has to be the rat wizard.

 

[Fag Albert]

. Or maybe you're a comics fan that isn't a redditor, then you're also likely familiar with the proto-superhero types like The Shadow and Doc Savage.

im exclusively a mandrake the magician fan

 

[herefortheactualthreads]

 

[Fascist Frederick]

Aw man, I shot @Marvin in the face.

 

[User names must be unique]

The Hornblower series is my favourite. It's about an autistic* officer in the royal navy during the Napoleonic wars really enjoyable books.


Not explicitly autistic, just a bit introverted and weird. very good at maths, very bad at socializing.

 

[el bandito loco]

Tarzan and related books are alright reading, but it's jarring when I remember the more cleaned up films/cartoons versus the Tarzan books being rather weird at times.

when I was in elementary school I really liked Tarzan. I was obviously aware there were multiple versions just from tv. the Disney one had come out, I'd seen some early b&w ones, some tv shows, etc. anyways I really dug the character. something universally interesting about some guy living like an animal and kicking ass.

my granddad gave me a set of most (all?) the original books for my 9th birthday or something and I was really thrown off by them. I loved them, still do, but they are fucking weird. I wasn't expecting dinosaurs, tiny people, the focus on his kid, a group of random ass medieval knights, Tarzan going to fight in WWI, those books are really not what pop culture would lead you to believe.

of course as I got older and the context of the pulp fiction ecosystem those books existed in all of that makes perfect sense but when you're 9 years old you basically expect Tarzan & Cheeta fighting off random poachers and treasure hunters and some lost city shenanigans not mad scientists creating hyper intelligent gorillas

 

[Alexander Thaut]

when I was in elementary school I really liked Tarzan. I was obviously aware there were multiple versions just from tv. the Disney one had come out, I'd seen some early b&w ones, some tv shows, etc. anyways I really dug the character. something universally interesting about some guy living like an animal and kicking ass.

my granddad gave me a set of most (all?) the original books for my 9th birthday or something and I was really thrown off by them. I loved them, still do, but they are fucking weird. I wasn't expecting dinosaurs, tiny people, the focus on his kid, a group of random ass medieval knights, Tarzan going to fight in WWI, those books are really not what pop culture would lead you to believe.

of course as I got older and the context of the pulp fiction ecosystem those books existed in all of that makes perfect sense but when you're 9 years old you basically expect Tarzan & Cheeta fighting off random poachers and treasure hunters and some lost city shenanigans not mad scientists creating hyper intelligent gorillas

IDK man I liked Opar.

 

[CognitiveDeficiency]

I find myself intrigued by how many fucking "Occult Detective" types there were in pulp fiction. I'm surprised this specific subgenre never became bigger in our pop culture. Like, it eventually sorta led to shit like Buffy and Supernatural, I guess? But I think it'd have been interesting to see something like a '40s or '50s adaptation of something in this subgenre.

There are a few examples, mostly British. Stuff like the Harry D'amour short stories by Clive Barker ended up getting tied into some of his bigger series. There was an adaptation of one of the stories called The Lord of Illusions.

There is the comic Hellblazer which follows John Constantine who is a warlock/detective specializing in occult cases. There was even a Hellblazer movie starting Keanu Reeves called Constantine.

Are there any pulp sword and sandal/planet writers/series/stories that go under the radar? I've been meaning to re-read all of Robert E Howard's stuff and to start on Fafnir and the Grey Mouser sometime this year. I'm aware of Moorcock's and Karl Wagner's work and would consider picking it all up eventually.

The Barsoom series is one of my all time favs. John Carpenter is a former Confederate officer who moved way out west after the South lost. While prospecting for gold he ends up having to escape from some indians and stumbles upon a cave that transports him to the surface of Mars. The radically different gravity of Earth and Mars essentially makes him a super man as he is stronger, faster, and more duable than all the Martian races. Basically he travels Mars, romancing beautiful women, fighting strange and alien species and becoming the hero king of the Red Martian people. There was a Disney adaptation called John Carpenter of Mars that is okay as a visual spectacle.

What kinda pulps do you guys recommend that aren't part of the well-known paths. What are your favorites? Should they be more well-known?

I really really love the Flashman books. He is an absolute piece of shit character, but he is so smug, cocky, and talented that he just gets away with fighting and fucking his way around the world in service of the King.


Now this isn't exactly a pulp novel, but it is kind of adjacent in the same way as Indian Jones is. The Ciaphas Cain series is a love letter to pulp fiction set in the Warhammer 40K universe which follows Commisar Cain as he fights the alien, the heretic, and the mutant across the universe. He is a bullshiter, a womanizer, and a fighter constantly fighting for mankind with his stepandfetch Jurgen at his side also prepared to serve a hot cup of tanna.

 

[Tablet County]

Also maybe I just missed it but I didn't see mention of The Shadow anywhere.

It's The Shadow, you're not supposed to see him.

There is the comic Hellblazer which follows John Constantine who is a warlock/detective specializing in occult cases. There was even a Hellblazer movie starting Keanu Reeves called Constantine.

Speaking of Constantine, has anyone ever read Simon Green? He's a trash author par excellence, by which I mean he sucks but he's great.
In high school I read his Nightside books, featuring protagonist John Taylor who is totally not John Constantine and some of the worst written romance subplots I've ever read. Damn entertaining though. He has a talent for creating really interesting side characters.

 

[*sigh*]

There’s also Dylan Dog, nightmare investigator. Spaghetti pulp meets Anglo occultism.

 

[Your Starter for 10]

Robert Aspirin never seems to get mentioned, but I'd consider him pure pulp. His Myth series is just absolute pre-teen to teen pulp, but with the added bonus (?) Of having some of the worst humor and puns ever set to paper.

On the other end of the spectrum he also started and edited Thieves World, a kind of shared universe (well, city) of anthology short stories from dozens of authors. I was always surprised something that should be very disjointed actually maintained a good timeline and central narrative.

Granted, its been 30 years since I read it, so my glasses could be extremely rose tinted.

But really, the ultimate pulp fiction book has to be Gravity's Rainbow. I'd also allow Against the Day since it is 4 pulps in one.

 

[Party Hat Wurmple]

You just know people are going to read this title and think its about the movie Pulp Fiction, not the literary genre.

I know I did. Deeply disappointed. 0/10. Expected to sperg about my foot fetish movie. Instead found....reading. Skreeeee...!!!!!

 

[millais]

Recently I have enjoyed reading pulp stories from the French Foreign Legion genre. Some are pretty awful and unbelievable, but others are clearly written by authors who had firsthand or secondhand experience of life in the Foreign Legion, or at least life in North Africa and Indochina between the world wars.

This is a good site that uploads high quality scans of such stories: https://monlegionnaire.wordpress.com/

In the OP, the H Rider Haggard novels are mentioned. Those predate the pulp era and are classic Victorian-era adventure novels, but very good all the same. Haggard's novels have a clear sense of authenticity, since Haggard actually lived and worked on the South African frontier during a formative period of his youth, and he saw and interacted with Bantus, Boers, and British colonials alike, so his characters and settings are strongly rooted in the real thing.

 

[Alexander Thaut]

Recently I have enjoyed reading pulp stories from the French Foreign Legion genre. Some are pretty awful and unbelievable, but others are clearly written by authors who had firsthand or secondhand experience of life in the Foreign Legion, or at least life in North Africa and Indochina between the world wars.

This is a good site that uploads high quality scans of such stories: https://monlegionnaire.wordpress.com/

In the OP, the H Rider Haggard novels are mentioned. Those predate the pulp era and are classic Victorian-era adventure novels, but very good all the same. Haggard's novels have a clear sense of authenticity, since Haggard actually lived and worked on the South African frontier during a formative period of his youth, and he saw and interacted with Bantus, Boers, and British colonials alike, so his characters and settings are strongly rooted in the real thing.

yeah the funny thing is that haggard was writing and publishing stuff into the '20s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Quatermain

I think they're very "adjacent" in the same sense that Sherlock Holmes or Arsene Lupin are "adjacent" to pulps.

 

[Shart Attack]

Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels are some of my favorite books. I'm also a big fan of the Adventures of Philip Marlowe radio serials from the 40s staring Gerald Mohr. I listen to podcasts of them a lot, along with the old Sam Spade serials. They're more family-friendly than the novels, but not by much. Chandler didn't have much involvement with the show, but he reportedly didn't hate what they did with his character. The Sam Spade serials, on the other hand, are exactly what you'd expect from a stereotypical 40s detective show. Spade always gets his man and the girl, and he always has some smartass quip or pun to lighten up a scene. He bears almost no resemblance to the cynical prick Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon. Still a fun radio show if you're into corny stuff.

I love most of Edgar Rice Burroughs' books, but I have to take him in small doses. The settings and plots of his stories vary, but they still start to feel the same after a while. John Carter sounds exactly like Tarzan, who sounds exactly like everyone in Pellucidar. They all speak in more or less the same stilted fashion, which is part of the charm but does get old after a while. As Cognitive Deficiency said, the Barsoom/Mars books are great, probably his best overall. The Caspak series of The Land that Time Forgot, The People that Time Forgot, and Out of Time's Abyss are also great. They're a lost-world type story where some people get trapped in a lost land populated by dinosaurs and cavemen -- including hot cave babes, of course. I live for that kind of story. It's so dumb and so formulaic yet so fun.

Harold Lamb seems to be criminally overlooked. I love pulp stories, and even I hadn't heard about him until I recently read Wolf of the Steppes, the first of four collections of his Cossack adventure stories. I will now proceed to sperg about how goddamn great Harold Lamb's Cossack stories are.

Spoiler: Cossack Sperging

The main character of the first collection is Khlit the Cossack, a grizzled, gray-bearded old Ukrainian Cossack. Unlike most pulp adventure main characters, he isn't a young, selfless, handsome warrior who always gets the girl. He's in his late 50s when the first story starts and in his 60s by the last story in the collection. He can still wield a sword when needed, but his old sword arm tires easily. He has to solve his problems with his wits instead, which is why critics almost always compare him to Odysseus. His fellow Cossacks try to force him into retirement at a monastery, and he decides, fuck that, he's going to ride off into the east to heap glory upon his name. He's not a noble hero seeking to right wrongs and save the downtrodden or anything, he just wants to show everyone he's still got some fight left in him. He's a warrior, and he wants to go out like a warrior. Modern fiction is almost entirely youth-oriented, full of awkward, effeminate, bitch-made idiot "men" who are always upstaged by strong, independent women. There's a massive shortage of old male heroes like Khlit, heroes who are middle-aged or older, self-assured, clever, and taciturn. It was a breath of fresh air to read about a badass old man for a change. That extends to the setting, too. The stories are set in the late 16th century, mostly in the Eurasian steppe, a setting you never really see in Western fiction.

A lot of pulp authors choke you with purple prose, like Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Lovecraft. Lamb's writing style is closer to Raymond Chandler's in that it's spare and direct. With a few well-placed adjectives, he sets up a vivid scene and quickly moves on to the action. He gives just enough description and explanation to give you a clear picture of the scene. It keeps the stories driving along at a brisk pace. It's hard to explain, but the descriptions give you the sense the author really knew a lot about his world. Lamb was also a historian who wrote histories about the Mongols and the Cossacks, among other subjects. He definitely knew his shit, and it comes through in his writing. I guess you could say it's tight, realistic worldbuilding with just enough left to your imagination to make the setting feel mysterious and fantastic.

"Thrilling" is an adjective that gets slapped on every movie trailer and book cover, but Lamb's Cossack stories are genuinely thrilling. The fact that Khlit is an old, grizzled bastard who can be overwhelmed if a fight takes more than a minute or two makes every fight feel impactful. A character seems more daring when you know he's vulnerable and pushing himself to his limits than when he's some living god like Tarzan or John Carter. The stories are brilliantly plotted and more complex than the average pulp story, always twisting and turning with double-crosses and dastardly schemes from evil Chinese eunuchs or Mongol shamans. And again, it's a setting you rarely see, so there's no way to predict what kind of shit Khlit is going to step into next.

Overall they're fantastically written stories that cover a lot of new ground, thrilling, exciting, funny, highly recommended, A++, good shit.