Pulp magazines are so called because of the cheap paper they were printed on. Frank A. Munsey pioneered the format in 1896 with The Argosy. Pulps picked up steam with titles like Blue Book (1906) and Adventure (1910), then exploded in 1912 when All-Story printed a little yarn by Edgar Rice Burroughs called "Tarzan of the Apes." Soon after, genre titles flourished, among them Detective Story, Western Story and Love Story. Then, in the Twenties, publishing legends such as Black Mask (1920), Weird Tales (1923) and Amazing Stories (1926) took hold.

In 1924, a new genre entered the canvas of magazine publishing: "true crime." The first was True Detective Mysteries (better known as True Detective), and the concept spread like wildfire. Over the years around 100 periodicals devoted their pages to true-crime stories. And regardless of the magazine’s name, their covers offered attention-grabbing graphics and shocking article titles, such as "The Crimson Crime in Glenburney Manor" and "The Corpse Swam Upstream."

Hardboiled Detectives

Started in the 1920s and perfected in the 1930s, the hard boiled detective was one of the most popular forms to arise from the pulp fiction magazines.

The hard boiled detective was a character who had to live on the mean streets of the city where fighting, drinking, swearing, poverty and death were all part of life. This new type of detective had to balance the day to day needs of survival against the desire to uphold the law and assist justice. Living in the toughest of environments, and required to be tougher than the evil surrounding him, our new heroes had to become "hard boiled".

In this new world, the hard boiled detective began to administer a new form of justice where if need be, he himself would cross the line and break the law, to insure that justice was done. Our hero was thrust into a world where he had to choose between different levels of evil and no one was truely on the side of good. His survival often depended upon a shoot first, ask questions later approach where the ability to reason out a murder is less important than the ability to fight one's way out of a jam.

This ushered in a new era of action packed detective stories where the murder no longer took place off stage and instead took place all around our hero on an ongoing basis. In some respects, the hard boiled detective was in response to the rising crime and gangster activety caused by Prohibition and then the Great Depression. But once Carroll John Daly introduced us to Race Williams, and Dashiell Hammett introduced us to Sam Spade, the world of detective fiction changed forever.

In 1931, Street & Smith was promoting Detective Story by having stories from the magazine dramatized on a radio show. The program’s narrator called himself "The Shadow," and S&S were quick to jump on this memorable name that had eclipsed the title of the magazine he was promoting. Within a few years The Shadow had started a whole rush of "hero pulps" including The Phantom Detective, Doc Savage, Nick Carter, G-8 and His Battle Aces, and The Spider. In the early Thirties, before radio really had its heyday, pulps were the dominant entertainment, like television is today.

After World War II, the demand for pulp magazines waned as a more durable cheap entertainment took hold: paperbacks. (These were often just as "pulpy" since they were being written by a lot of the same authors.) In the Fifties, television became the favored form of escapism and the surviving pulps finally ceased publication. Fiction magazines continued to be published, of course, but these science-fiction and mystery digests, and "men’s magazines," aren’t considered pulps.

Great websites to check out about this era are at;

http://www.patterson-smith.com/mags.htm            Back Issues

http://www.otr.com/blog/index.php/?s=pulp          Radio Shows   

http://home.comcast.net/~pulpgallery/sort.html      Book Covers

http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/pulpcrime    Pulp Art