Charles Boeckman Jr., one of the last surviving pulp fictioneers, has died less than a month shy of his 95th birthday.
I didn’t hear about his passing until I saw a post about it last night on Pulpetti, Juri Nummelin‘s blog. Then a quick search on Facebook confirmed the news.
Writing as Charles Beckman Jr., he broke into the pulps in the mid-1940s and continued writing for them until their demise in the late 1950s. His work appeared in Star Western, Detective Tales, Fifteen Western Tales, Dime Western and others. One of his stories was adapted as “Ambition” during the sixth season of TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1961.
Boeckman was also a skilled jazz clarinetist and saxophonist, and wrote a jazz history for young readers titled Cool, Hot and Blue.
Late in his life, his wife Patti helped call attention to Boeckman and his work, which led to Bold Venture Press publishing Pulp Jazz: The Charles Boeckman Story and two pulp anthologies, and new works published by Pro Se Productions.
Patti Boeckman also wrote the entry for her husband at The PulpWiki. You can read an interview with him at The Education of a Pulp Writer, David Cranmer‘s blog, and hear an interview with him on the Texas Standard news program. his obituary in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
A lifelong Texan, Boeckman was born in Seguin, Texas, on Nov. 9, 1920. He died in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Oct. 12, 2015, at age 94.
