Introducing Dime Pulp

What is pulp fiction, anyway? Immediately the lurid color illustrations of pulp magazines covers depicting a damsel in some sort of distress or at least dominating the picture plane and advertising an unspoken prurience come to mind. For many, the bygone era of pulp fiction was reading entertainment before movies, radio and then television replaced that particular skill.  Whatever designation anyone might want to tack on to it, pulp is a unique American prose style based on the economy of storytelling needed to fit into the word count constraints of the magazines that published them. Many of those pulp writers were also journalists skilled in succinctness and cutting to the chase. While much of the writing could be considered uncouth, déclassé, or trash, the penny-a-word hacks churned out a kind of fantastic storytelling that’s been around since practically the invention of writing (if one is to believe Mikhail Bakhtin). Crime fiction itself has an American origin, in Baltimore, from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe. The superstars of that genre, Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner, were published in the highly respected Black Mask Magazine but also in magazines like Dime Detective, and Spicy Detective.  An abundance of irony and a certain cynicism set the requisite tone. There are only bad people and less bad people and they don’t even think of themselves in that way. The modern gaze is blurred in discerning right from wrong because we inhabit the age of relativity. It’s all very dark, particularly after the war, some might even say “noir.” Crime fiction and westerns are where the tough hombres and mujeres live, lines are drawn in the sand or around corpses and someone is always on the wrong side (or so it seems). In the early pulps, those shady characters were roughly drawn, sketchy, succinct, the dialogue terse, wisecracking, the action constant.

The first issue of Dime Pulp Volume I, presents the initial installments in the serialization of two full length novels, The Last Resort and A Detective Story, as well as a short story from the series of tales under the rubric of Hard Boiled Myths. As was often done in the days of yore, the writers appear under pseudonyms. “Colin Deerwood,” the author of A Detective Story, is an amateur historian who claims to have been inspired to write his period piece after contemplating the cover of an issue of Black Mask. “Helena Baron-Murdock,” under her own name is a scholar of comparative religions and myth and is the creator of Sheriff’s Detective Jim Donovan of the Hard Boiled Myths short story series. The Last Resort, A Lee Malone Adventure, by poet and publisher Pat Nolan (not a pseudonym but in Nolan’s estimation, he is obscure enough not to need one) was written to upend the stereotypical image of the hard boiled crime sleuth. The Last Resort was originally published by Nualláin House, Publishers, in 2012—it is serialized here for the first time. There are also a few more authors waiting in the wings (chaffing at the bit) to contribute to future issues. The authors are given a free hand to have fun in writing their pulp fiction because they certainly aren’t getting paid. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first: click the bold text below each story header and start your reading of Dime Pulp, Number One, Volume One.

                                                                          —Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe
and word accountant

The Last Resort, Chapters 1-3

Long Shot I

“This kind of story always starts with a blonde“