Maybe that, and the GG art on the covers, were reasons for
their popularity. But those covers also show urban working-
and under-class settings as well as clothing and body
language typical of people of these backgrounds. Many
of their readers identified more with the stories of Cain,.
McCoy, Thompson, or Goodis rather than a high-brow,
culturally sanctioned one. Police and racketeers were many
readers' antagonists, as well as the writers'. What seems
amusing or camp today was much more than amusing when the
1950s crime novels were being written and read. The _Sunday
Morning_ focus on those sexy outrageous covers, while good
for Hard Case Crime now that King is their latest author,
trivialized the genre (as Hard Cases writers, both classic
and contemporary, certainly do not).
---------------------------------------
I thought King did a great job but I thought the reporter was
uninformed and condescending. The piece started off with the
host saying something about it sure wasn't high art but pulp
did have a big following...John D. once commented that he
wrote fiction for men who carried their lunches in buckets
and he thought that they were his primary audience. Every
time NYC talks about pulp or noir they do the hambone private
eye send-up voice and then show a dame or two. I've been
reading a lot of early John D and Charles Williams lately.
They were the true voice of my father's generation, men who
fought in the big war and came home thankful but profoundly
different from the boys they'd been when they first went
overseas. The best of the 50's paperbacks tracked the
spiritual lives of these men (and those who fought in Korea
as well), from John D, Williams, Vin Packer, John McPartland
etc to the later group of Charles Runyon, Dan J. Marlowe and
Dennis Lynds under different names. I wish just once that
network TV (or hell, NPR) could do a serious segment on pulp
without dismissing it right at the top. To a lesser extent,
the crime pulps of the Twenties and Thirties did much the
same spiritual tracking of immigrant groups, notably Jews and
Irish Catholics. I don't quite understand how the media can
take nancy Drew so seriously (and I'm all for it) but find
male pulp ridiculous on its face. Amen, brothers and sisters;
amen, the Reverend Gorman is retiring to his study now.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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