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Novel Ideas: The 1940s and '50s were the golden age of pulp fiction.
Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
Remember When
The thrills of pulp fiction
By Cookie Curci-Wright
Fifty years ago, you couldn't walk into a local soda shop, grocery store or cigar shop without bumping into a wire rack filled with pulp fiction.
These paperback novels featured daring detectives, seductive women and dastardly villains--all part of the 1940s and the '50s pulp fiction allure.
I remember well those gaudy-covered books, magazines and comics that decorated the walls and filled the wire racks of our local creamery. It was our habit, back then, among my teenage pals, to take a book from these shelves and read its most exciting passages while we sipped our sodas. When we finished, we returned the book to the rack. One day, the store owner posted a large sign over the book rack. It read: THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY--ANY BOOKS TAKEN TO THE COUNTER WILL BE CHARGED TO THE CUSTOMER. From that point on, our reading endeavors steadily declined.
It was in the pages of tawdry paperback novels that many teenagers learned about romance and the facts of life. Young girls kept their secret copies of Kathleen Windsor's erotic bestseller Forever Amber hidden under their pillows; boys concealed their covert copies of Dr. Kinsey's morals-shaking Sexual Behavior In the Human Male stashed under their mattresses. Meanwhile, mom and dad were learning how to rear their young by reading the revolutionary new child-guidance manual, Common Sense Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock. (Decades later, the author would recant his theory.) Also hot reading on the paperback reader's list was D.H. Lawrence's story of illicit romance, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Vladimir Nabokov's scandalously sexy Lolita.
While most of America was reading spicy, novels many others were enthralled by the nonfiction bestseller The Search for Bridey Murphy. This book, by Morey Bernstein, set off a national obsession with reincarnation in the mid 1950s. The book later fell from grace when the story was debunked.
But of all the mind-stirring, life-changing novels of the decade, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place had the greatest impact on a blossoming generation. Its popularity launched a movie and a TV series in the late '50s, but more than that, the paperback version would become the hottest and most clandestinely read book in teenage America.
During the 1940s, America had at least 50 book clubs selling specialty volumes to suit all tastes. Pocket-sized books rose meteorically in popularity. It was pulp fiction's heyday and the height in mail-order book sales. The Book of the Month Club annually distributed thousands of titles.
The decade of the 1940s opened with the appearance of the first inexpensive paperback reprint of a hardcover bestseller; swift-moving thrillers that touched and thrilled readers' imaginations. Fading romance novels and detective stories graced the shelves at our corner market, the 5&10 store and soda shop--all new locations for these "dime novels" that cost a quarter.
WWII played an important part in the growing popularity of pulp fiction. USO clubs and military libraries offered servicemen a well-stocked supply of paperbacks and they soon acquired the habit of reaching for a book to pass the time.
Dashiel Hammet's lively detective novels were among the most-read of the decade's paperbacks. His fast-paced, realistic detective classics spawned a series of pulp-fiction detectives. Hammet's popular novels gave birth to two of Hollywood's most enduring private eyes: Sam Spade and Nick Charles. His characters epitomized the hard-boiled detective, who, despite a dark and sinister lifestyle, still adhered to a personal code of ethics. The story's characters, ambiance and motivation were more important to readers than the solving of the crime.
Hammet's crime sleuths, better known as "gumshoes" and "private dicks," and Mickey Spillane's private eye, Mike Hammer, became the archetypes for the era's pulp-fiction detectives.
Pulp fiction, so named for the low quality of paper the books were printed on, was riding a crest of popularity in the late '40s. One of my personal favorites from the decade was a pulp magazine called Weird Tales. This scary bit of fiction featured a young writer by the name of Ray Bradbury, who later became one of America's foremost science fiction writers. Like many magazines of this genre, it caused me many a sleepless night. Typical of these stories was one called "The Final Hour," which appeared in the January 1947 issue. The story is about a terminally ill author who offers his soul to Satan in exchange for seven more years of life so he can finish a monumental book. At the end of the seven years, Satan comes to collect his due. But he goes away thwarted when he discovers that the man's soul is already gone--the author literally poured his heart and soul into his book!
Dime store novels took center stage in our post-war America, while television, the slayer of the written word, sat patiently waiting in the wings to make its grand debut.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
