The Golden Age of Pulps

BY ALLAN R. BOSWORTH

AT EVENTIDE, when gun smoke and alkali dust swirl across the television screens of this wide land, my living room is peopled with the querulous ghosts of characters who died with their boots on a quarter century ago, thinking they had come to the end of the trail. As a writer for the pulp magazines of that time, I knew the marshals of Dodge, the Cochise sheriff or his prototype, the peripatetic gun, the Rangers, and Sugarfoot; I knew the ink-stained but incorruptible editor of the Coyote Bend Weekly Howl, and Judge Roy Bean, and the rawhide men who laid Union Pacific steel end to end until they reached the sunset. I knew them and many another tall, rangy, wide-shouldered, lean-hipped, and bowlegged waddy long before the picture tube wrought their resurrection — in fact, I created many of them, and rode the range with them for a penny a word. In those days, I had one of the fastest typewriters in the West.

This, as I have said, was twenty-five years ago. The hills were higher then, and the mornings younger. It was a wonderful time, long ago and far away, when the pulps were an art form, a training ground, and a way of life purely American. All a man had to do to earn a fast fifty or hundred bucks was to roll a sheet of virginal dime-store foolscap into his typewriter and begin with what the masters of the craft called a “narrative hook.” It went something like this:

Slouching in his saddle as sundown painted the rimrocks and dusk rolled like purple tide into the canyons, Concho Collins looked down into the Bar 7 pasture at the bunch of longhorn steers he was going to rustle that night.

Somewhere down in the chaparral, a bullbat woke the stillness with its liquid, lonesome call, and a coyote gave voice to shrill lament from a farther hill. Concho, a tall, rangy, wide-shouldered ranny from the Tumbling K spread, felt compelled to confide in his horse.

“Compadre,” he told the wiry roan mustang as he rolled a smoke, “I reckon there’s a difference between rustlin’ and rustlin’ — sometimes. You see, back three-four years ago, Brad Johnson kind of run a sandy on the Tumblin’ K. Seems like he was mighty free with his runnin’ iron on that spring’s calf crop . . .”

It was not literature, but it was a living while it lasted, and it lasted nearly twenty years. The Golden Era of the pulps began in the early twenties, when the splintery magazines had many millions more readers than did Scott Fitzgerald. It ended with more whimper than bang-bang, about 1940, leaving a lot of writers destitute and bewildered.

Things like that leave their scars; they drive men to seek the shelter of the herd, to band together. There is now an organization called Western Writers of America, and I should like to think of its members as a little group of lean and silent men with crow’s-feet around their eyes from squinting into sunswept distances and the smoke of lonely campfires—a little Border Legion living west of the law of change. I looked something like that when I was a Western writer. Often, when I had just ventilated the villain with a .45 slug, I would get up from the typewriter chair that gave me saddlesores and practice a quick draw of an imaginary gun before the mirror, so that I might be able to describe the shoot-out better, next time. I could see that my eyes were becoming narrowed to mere lidded slits from the glare of sun on alkali, and my legs looked as if a horse had just run out from between them. But now no writer has to enact his characters’ roles — the television stars do that for him — and the occupational hazards of Western writing are limited principally to the television ratings.

In the summer of 1958 the Western Writers of America rattled into Santa Rosa, California, for a convention, and published reports indicated that they were substantial citizens, living high on the hog and bent on serious examination of such profitable phenomena as the late Davy Crockett sweep that had been started by one of their members, Tom Blackburn. Some of the other matters they reportedly discussed were, to me, totally incomprehensible — such as when the villain should be shot, and when he should be treated as sick, sick. In the Golden Era, this matter was never debated. There was more gore on the cover of one of the old pulp magazines than is splashed on a 21-inch screen in a whole week of television fare, and it was always in color. We used to kill off a bad man every thousand words — always, of course, in fair fight and against heavy odds.

There was a flair to their dying, those mangy rustlers, horse thieves, bobwire-cutters, and sheepherders, and any writer worth his lick of salt could expand the final scene into three or more paragraphs and increase his check by ten dollars. They always lurched sideways, as if struck down by a giant, unseen hand. Or they clutched their bellies and pitched forward in a limp, grotesque heap, smearing their evil faces (suddenly drained of all color) in the hot alkali dust. Their guns slipped from suddenly nerveless hands, and they mouthed incoherent curses through a froth of crimson that bubbled from their twisted, ashen lips. Their knees buckled and they sagged, caving in like a sack of corn meal suddenly emptied. (If a Western writer had suddenly been deprived of the word “suddenly,” he would have been without one of the most valuable tools of his trade.) Sometimes a thin trickle of scarlet crept down their stubbled cheeks, but this was seldom called blood. Few of the pulp magazines would print the word, even though blood was all over the homestead.

After the shoot-out, the hero — a Galahad in chaps — holstered his smoking hog-leg and rode away, leaving the bad men to lie where they fell. The unburied dead of the old pulp West must have run into the tens of thousands, and their bones are still bleaching somewhere under the suns of high or low noon. I weep, remembering them, because I found the slaughter highly remunerative — especially during the depression years. The pulps thrived magnificently during the depression. The jobless, and those on relief, might not have been able to afford a movie, but they could always spare a dime for a pulp book, and they had time to read it by the stove without their attention being diverted by television.

One rather prolific pulp writer of my acquaintance was more considerate of the dead to whom he owed his living. In a moment of wonderful whimsey, Chuck Martin founded a Boot Hill graveyard behind his home at Oceanside, California, and thereafter never killed a man without setting up a rough pine slab bearing an epitaph such as:

Here Lies

Horseface McGinty —

He Was Quick with His Gun,

But the Tucumcari Kid Was Quicker.

Chuck ran out of cemetery plots, if not out of the fiction kind, but not before his whimsey won him a page of publicity in Life magazine.

For the most part, I always chose names for my villains that began with a sibilant sound. I imagined most of my readers moved their lips when they read, and this enabled them to hiss the villain satisfactorily. But once, having run out of Sneeds, Schriers, Spradlins, Zapatas, and the like, I killed a man named MacDowell. The story was no sooner on the newsstands than I received a letter from a well-known pulp writer I had never met — Syl MacDowell — informing me that I had overstepped the line. He said that his next villain, doomed to die like the dog he would be, was going to be named Bosworth.

I cannot imagine that the writers of Western television scripts can approach their chores with that sort of relaxed, fun-loving attitude: the deadline is too near, the medium too demanding. In the Golden Era, a rejection slip meant very little; the story would sell somewhere along the line, perhaps months later, and the check would be like money from home. New pulp books were always being launched like trial balloons — first, perhaps, as quarterlies — and a surprising number of them stayed with us. Some men could write a lot of words at a penny a word and up. The “up” for the masters was considerable. The late Max Brand became quite famous — in the Western field, principally, for his Destry Rides Again — and his books go on in soft covers, and of late a hardcover collection is being advertised. He lived in an Italian villa, and few of his pulp magazine fans knew that under his real name, Frederick Faust, he wrote beautiful things for the best literary magazines (including, if I remember correctly, the Atlantic). W. C. Tuttle, who created such characters as “Hashknife” and “Sleepy,” was reported living fabulously on an Arizona ranch.

The king of the pulps was the late Henry Bedford-Jones, who used production-line methods and did nothing but 10,000-word novelettes because he had found that novelettes were always featured on the covers. Around the time in which Frederick O’Brien was writing White Shadows in the South Seas, Bedford-Jones was a member of the same literary colony in Sausalito, California, except that he was making much more money. Another member of the group told me that Bedford - Jones had a battery of three electric typewriters and kept a story going in each: a Western in the first, a French Foreign Legion yarn in the second, and a South Seas pearl pirate thriller in the third. He used the touch system and never plotted; neither did he rewrite. If his swift narrative pace slowed on the Western, he moved quickly to the Sahara or Tahiti, and averaged 10,000 words a day. Adventure, a great magazine in its middle years, was said to be paying him eight cents a word, and eight hundred dollars was and still is a fair day’s wage. Published reports of a court action, circa 1929, revealed that Bedford-Jones had earned $75,000 in the previous year.

OWING to the accident of birth and a certain congenital tardiness in arriving upon any promising financial scene, I was never a Brand or BedfordJones; and besides, I was afraid to give up my newspaper job. But I profited. I discovered that the “narrative hook" could be adapted to fit any pulp magazine, Western or otherwise, and I worked out a formula for the All-purpose Little Jim Dandy opening. It is, alas, no longer useful or salable, and I think of it fondly as the past participle. A new magazine called Navy Stories appeared, and the opening for it went:

Swinging his long glass aft from the bridge of the camouflaged U.S. troop transport as it groped through the foggy, submarine-infested waters of the Atlantic, Dippolito, the hard-boiled Navy quartermaster from San Francisco’s tough Telegraph Hill, looked through the window of the paymaster’s shack. The long glass brought the paymaster’s safe so close Dippolito could read the numbers on the combination lock. The safe held at least a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in greenbacks. Dippolito was going to rob it that night . . .

I think this was the way Bedford-Jones did it. He crammed a character, a setting, and a situation into one packed paragraph, and after that the plot and its unfolding took care of themselves. Eugene Kelly, then editor of several early-day Dell books, including Navy Stories and War Stories, sent me a prompt telegram: “Check for $125 airmailed today. Can use all your stuff.” So I did the same thing for War Stories:

Lifting himself on one elbow from his rain-sodden blanket, Corporal Joe Morgan looked down the muddy trench at the man he was going to kill when A Company went over the top into the shell-torn waste of No Man’s Land . . .

Gene Kelly bought that one, too, and others. How long, I asked myself, has this been going on? A man could get rich using that All-purpose Little Jim Dandy opening gambit. The variations on the theme were endless.

I suppose half the pulp writers in the country were using this device in one form or another, telling themselves as I did that it was like taking candy from a baby. And in using it. we may have been lightly sowing the seeds of our own destruction along with that of the booming pulp-paper empire. Perhaps, if we had taken our craft more seriously — if we had written each story with care and the best of our skills, and without tongue in cheek — the pulps would have endured. But in the early 1930s there was no sign of impending crash. The newsstands were rife with pulps. They advertised weight-lifting courses for scrawny weaklings on their inside front cover and thoughtfully pictured trusses on the facing pages. Pen pals were getting together in the back of the books. I had two memorable fan letters. One was from a stenographer in Omaha who said. “Dear Man of Mystery: Tonight I will walk along the banks of the big Muddy and let my dreams ride on the backs of fireflies.”The other was from a man in a mental institution at Norwalk, California, and said, “I can tell by your stories that you are a cattleman. I am a cattleman, too, and I ain’t crazy.

I want you to go to the Governor and get me the hell out of here. If you don’t do this, I sure as hell am coming gunning for you when I do get out.”

I sold stories to a great variety of Western pulps. I got into other fields: Love Stories, Sea Stories, Navy Stories, Submarine Stories, and a whole flight of air-war books which took wing after such films as Hell’s Angels and Wings. I aimed at the weeklies, since each one offered fifty-two markets a year, and parlayed a single yarn about a mule skinner named Shorty Masters into nearly two hundred stories for Street & Smith’s Wild West Weekly, then edited by Ronald Oliphant. With his encouragement, I began doing “stray" yarns for the same magazine under pen names which were owned by Street & Smith: Philip F. Deere, Dean McKinley, Nels Anderson, and Cleve Endicott. I did a series on Judge Roy Bean. Law West of the Pecos, under the Dean McKinley by-line and a series on two cowboy comics named Bugeye and Jeff under the nom de plume of Frank J. Litchfield. I collaborated with myself to produce Circle J Ranch novelettes under the joint by-line of Cleve Endicott and Dean McKinley; I was both. A series recounting the adventures of two Navy fliers in World War I — Humpy Campbell and Tex Malone — ran about seventy-five stories in Dell’s War Aces and War Birds, and there was a shorter series dealing with an unbelievable character named Dizzy Donovan, who was always inspired to write parodies on verse when in flight, the first being entitled, “A Bunch of the Boche Were Whooping It Up.” The air-war yarns extended to Sky Riders, Sky Birds, and Battle Birds. There was gold in them there thrills.

And then the so-called “Spicies,” issued by an outfit known as Trojan Publications, appeared upon the scene.

I don’t think that anybody knew it, but the pulp Western was on its last saddle-bowed legs. Spicy Western and Candid Western (Trojan also published Spicy Detective and Candid Detective) tried something new. They attempted to wed the clean, swiftpaced Western action story to the sex yarn. This was miscegenation, and could not be accomplished without benefit of double-barreled shotgun. Nor could the union last.

I suspect that a Trojan editor had read the works of the old master, Zane Grey. It was in Riders of the Purple Sage, I believe, that Grey took the Western writer’s first tremulous step into sex. His hero’s saddle pard had been shot off a horse. The hero sprang to the ground and ran his hand into his companion’s shirt, strictly to feel the heartheat. He jerked the hand back quickly, blushed, and removed his Stetson. “Why,” he said in awe and reverence, “he’s—I mean she’s — it’s a girl!” (I am not quoting this passage verbatim, but only as I remember it from reading Zane Grey when I was about twelve. At the time, it puzzled me considerably.)

Spicy Western and Candid Western followed the same story line. Sex, in these palpitant pulps, was limited to the verbal fondling of the feminine bosom, and it had to be done in every second paragraph or the story would not sell. Trojan was paying two and a half cents a word for this titillating material — a rather high rate. I used a pen name, and I also used the old All-purpose Jim Dandy:

Propping himself on one elbow above his coffee in the Greasy Spoon restaurant, Luke Bristow looked down the counter at the waitress he hoped to take to the Cowboys’ Ball that next Saturday night.

Her name, Laura Belle, was like music on the tongue. Her hair was the color of wild honey in the sun, and she had eyes of storm-cloud blue. Her proud young bosom lifted twin cones of climaxed beauty under the silken shimmer of her blouse . . .

The Trojans did not last very long, actually, and certainly I was not alone in helping to kill them off. Every story became a game, a contest between writer and editor, a search for simile, a ludicrous striving for action, such as the jolting of a buckboard across the rough prairie, or Laura Belle’s horse in a trot.

I really don’t know what happened to destroy this art form, this easy way of life. The comic books appeared, and had their part in the decline and fall, but surely there were some adults in the reader population. Radio programs were growing up, and it was less effort to listen than to read. A war broke out in Europe, and the cost of wood pulp rose; kids knew all about the latest fighter aircraft, and stories of dogfights in World War I were passé. Some sort of hoof-and-mouth disease struck the straight Westerns, and their carcasses littered the prairie like those of longhorn steers in the famous “die-ups” of the eighties. One day Trojan’s Spicy group still enlivened the newsstands; the next, either Troy or the editors had been sacked, and a lot of writers were carried away on their shields.

I was present for the obsequies. A score of shoot-’em-up pulp titles were interred in a narrowgrave just six by three, while coyotes and indigent pulp writers wailed a funeral dirge. In the background (courtesy of Trojan) the Grand Tetons of Wyoming lifted their proud, climaxed beauty into the fading sky. There was a glow of sunset on the rimrocks, and an intermittent, fitful, sporadic, split-second stab of six-shooter flame from a crowd of pulp heroes and villains turned out to pasture. Not one of them even dreamed of a television resurrection. They just went that-a-way.