The Shocking Hard-Boiled World of Librarians

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10 Best Spy Novel Film Adaptations

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Pulp Fiction Cover Redesigns of Classic Novels

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Weird Pulp Covers from a Bygone Era

A gallery, care of the Huffington Post.

The Crime Novel Dress

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E.E. Smith Cover Art Gallery

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James Bama's 'Doc Savage' Covers

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Frank Frazetta's Eerie Covers

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Case Closed

CBS News is reporting that a Dashiell Hammett story is finally getting released, years after the author's death.

From the story...

"So I Shot Him," a 19-page crime thriller written in the clipped style Hammett made famous in "The Maltese Falcon" and other works, will appear in the winter/spring issue of Strand Magazine, managing editor Andrew F. Gulli said Thursday. The issue comes out Feb. 28.

And, talking of Hammett, AbeBooks takes a harder look at the man's hard-boiled life.

Thirty-One John D. MacDonald Titles and Taglines

The list, and brief intro, by the Daily Rumpus.

From the piece...

Part of what this means is that many, many books no longer have any value at all—and will disappear into recycling. A while back I found a few bushels of paperbacks in a library recycling bin. They were unmarked, donations, but were adjudged to be worthless. I found a few things of which I’d never heard and a great many more by pulp novelist John D. MacDonald. My dad likes MacDonald and I pulled about forty titles back from the brink. Before I mailed them, I wrote down the taglines and titles.

We all know about pulp cover art, but here, like rubbings off tombstones, a fossil record of casually unacceptable social mores, and as ephemeral as salty candy, are thirty-one John D. MacDonald titles and taglines...

Creepy!

The illustrations of Frank Frazetta.

Cult Pulp

Sabotage Times separates the wheat from the chaff in regards to pulp fiction.

From the piece...

In the late 1970s, New English Library specialised in trash fiction such as the Skinhead and Suedehead novels written under various pen names by James Moffat (who influenced Stewart Home, author of the 1999 novel Cunt –now there’s a cult title if ever I heard one). NEL also produced a neat line in trash horror with books such as James Herbert’s The Rats and Guy N. Smith’s Night of the Crabs. Smith has penned well over a hundred works, mostly horror but also much else, from soft porn to Walt Disney novelizations. But even his prolific output is dwarfed by that of Walter B. Gibson, who, as Maxwell Grant, wrote 282 novel-length stories, from the 1930s to the 1950s, about US comic-book hero The Shadow. These were my favourites on NEL’s ’70s list, and I still regard it as a pity that they only reprinted the first four or five in the series.

Like Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s most famous creation, The Shadow, may live on through films and television – the 1994 movie with Alec Baldwin frequently crops up in the schedules – but when did anyone last read one of the books, and where are they now? I can’t walk past the second-hand book market beneath London’s Waterloo Bridge without devoting another half-hour of my life to the search, so far in vain. A couple of recent finds raised some excitement, however. One was the ’60s cold war/sci-fi thriller Hauser’s Memory by Curt Siodmak, an overlooked sequel to his earlier book Donovan’s Brain, which, in addition to two movie adaptations, spawned Steve Martin’s spoof, The Man with Two Brains, and a Star Trek episode called ‘Spock’s Brain’. The other find was a sci-fi tale called The Last Continent by forgotten ’70s author Edmund Cooper; his novel The Overman Culture still haunts me, from when I first read it thirty-odd years ago, as a far-sighted forerunner to the fictional worlds of The Matrix, A.I. and Blade Runner – though, of course, when it comes to cult sci-fi gods, no one beats Philip K. Dick.

The Pulp Fiction Collection at the University of Otago, New Zealand

Enjoy the gallery, here.

Selling History with a Pulpy Punch

The New York Times has a piece on a new series of history books that the creator of Salon.com is creating.

From the story...

The rendezvous was set for 2 p.m. sharp at Cafe Sabarsky on the teeming island metropolis of Manhattan. This Old World outpost was dark and silent as a tomb — except for the music, lively chatter and oversize windows. Near the bar sat a white-haired gentleman in black and a vivacious blonde with a slash of blood-red lipstick. On the table in front of them lay a plate of spätzle mit schwammerln and a knife that glinted like the sharpened steel of a scimitar. Actually, the only thing it was used for was butter, as the team at this cafe, the brother and sister team of David and Margaret Talbot, save the gore for print. They are the mild-mannered creators of a new book series called “Pulp History,” rip-roaring nonfiction tales with enough purple prose, gory illustrations and va-va-va-voom women to lure in even reluctant teenage male readers.

Where Did Science Fiction Come From?

io9 gives us all a primer on pulps.

From the piece...

A common misperception is that there was a genre of "pulp fiction." There wasn't. The pulps were the medium, not the genre. As a term of aesthetic and literary judgment "pulp" applies not to a genre, but to the approach of the pulp writers and magazines: an emphasis on adventure; the privileging of plot over characterization; the use of dialogue and narration as means for delivering information rather than displaying authorial style; the regular use and exploitation of the exotic, whether racial, sexual, socioeconomic, or geographic; simple emotions strongly expressed; and good always triumphing over evil.

The genres used in the pulps were those of traditional popular fiction: action/adventure, detective, science fiction, romance, and so on. The majority of pulps specialized in a specific genre. But the apparently overt emphasis on genre in the specialist pulp magazines was often gainsaid by the content of the stories. Each issue of a specialty pulp was filled with stories within that specialty, but there was a considerable amorphousness in the amount of other-genre material each specialist pulp allowed in its issues. This was especially true with science fiction, which sneaked into everything from sports pulps to railway pulps to the pages of Underworld Romance.

The pulps have long suffered from the perception that they were full of bad writing. Unfortunately, this perception is correct. Although many of the writers were skilled professionals, the low pay rate of the pulps–anywhere from a half cent to 1.25 cents per word–meant that a full-time writer had to write quickly rather than well if he or she wanted to keep him or herself above the poverty line. Moreover, the demand for stories–there were a thousand pulps, a number of which published weekly and biweekly rather than monthly–was so great that the pulps published a large number of stories by amateurs and by writers who wrote only a handful of stories, and most of these writers produced hasty, and therefore inferior, work.

Tamil Pulp

NPR takes a gander at some sexy, gory fiction from India - Tamil pulp.

From the piece...

Forget The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Indumathi's Hold On A Minute I'm In The Middle of A Murder is coming to America. Here's a quote from this foreign best-seller:

"Suddenly a trickle of blood began to flow from a crack in the stone tomb. How could fresh blood come out of a tomb built in 1977?"

The story is part of a collection of Tamil pulp fiction that's been translated into English.

Tamil has always been the language of high culture in India. Its literature is 2000 years old, its poetry exquisite.

But some of the most widely read stories in Tamil have titles like Sweetheart, Please Die.

You see these books everywhere in India. The covers are lurid, mustachioed men menacing women in tight nurse's uniforms, knives dripping blood, and lots of cleavage. Rakesh Khanna, a Californian living in India, wanted to find out more about the stories. So he hired a translator. Now, they have put together Volume II of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.

A Journey Round My Skull has a gallery of some vintage Tamil pulp covers, here.

The Cover Art of Roy Krenkel

Golden Age Comic Books celebrates the cover art of Roy Krenkel, particularly his work done on Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. Enjoy!