What’s to come…

That’s Pulp! That’s the name of my new blog, hosted here on ThePulp.Net by the generosity of Bill Lampkin. Thanks, Bill!

So, what’s it going to be about? Well, just about anything that I encounter that seems the least bit pulpy. If it’s lurid, if it’s sensationalistic, if it’s high on action and low on characterization, if it’s lovably cheesy… it’s fair game for That’s Pulp!

Will I review pulp magazine stories? You bet! Movies? If they seem pulpy enough, sure. How about old radio shows? Well, don’t expect me to be writing about Jack Benny or Ma Perkins, but there was some OTR that definitely qualifies… I’m thinking The Shadow and I Love A Mystery, for example. Old movie serials? I think they were the epitome of movie pulpdom, so you can expect me to post a few reviews of my favorite serials.

Speaking of serials, my first “official” blog entry will be a review of the 15-chapter serial The Spider’s Web. You don’t get any pulpier than that! Take one of the top pulp heroes and place him in a movie chapter-play designed to bring kids into the theaters every Saturday morning for four months. Death-defying cliffhangers and enough bullet-riddled bodies to make any mother shudder… if that doesn’t qualify for this blog then nothing does!

My personal history with the pulps, and things pulp-related, goes back to my young teens in the 1960s. KEX-AM radio in Portland, Ore., started playing old recordings of The Shadow. I loved it, and the fact that my mom disapproved (too violent) only made it more appealing. And, when weather conditions were just right, radio signals from way down in San Francisco would bounce up to Portland, and I could hear station KGO.

On Saturday nights, KGO-AM played a two-hour block of Dreadful Mysteries, with horror-host Claude the Magnificent. Jim Dunbar, the station’s program director, played the part of the Bela Lugosi-like host, and introduced me to The Black Museum with Orson Welles, Lights Out, as well as some less-shuddery fare like The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Third Man. I lay on the floor of my bedroom, ear glued to the radio, much as kids did when these were originally broadcast in the 1940s and 1950s.

In The Beginning

My introduction to actual pulp magazine stories came when I was a sophomore in high school, and my neighbor, Billy Thomas, showed me some Doc Savage paperbacks. I was sold! It was time to leave those Hardy Boys books behind and move up to some real literature. I read them just as fast as they could publish them.

A couple years later, I purchased a copy of the hardback book The Weird Adventures of The Shadow. I loved the radio show, and innocently thought this would be the same character. It wasn’t. I remember getting the book in the mail and immediately sitting down and flipping the pages looking for the “good parts” where The Shadow turned invisible. I didn’t find any. It gradually dawned upon me that these stories were reprinted from the pulp magazine stories, and the pulp version of The Shadow couldn’t cloud men’s minds so that they could not see him. That was strictly the radio Shadow. Disappointed, I set the book aside and didn’t get back to it for nearly 30 years.

My interest in old radio shows continued through my high school and college years and beyond. I continued collecting open-reel tapes of OTR fairly regularly, but my interest in pulp magazine stories never really caught fire until the mid-1990s. It was late 1996 when a friend of mine loaned me photocopies of five Shadow pulp stories. By sheer luck, the first one I read was probably the greatest Shadow story every written: “The Voodoo Master.” I was hooked.

Between Christmas break of 1996 and October 2003 I read every Shadow story ever published in the pulp magazines. All 325 of them! Sometimes I read the actual magazine, but more often I read a photocopy made by fellow pulp fans who generously shared them. As I was reading them I was writing short reviews, summarizing the plots and mentioning some of the high points of each story, and posting the reviews on my web site. Once I had read them all, I wanted more… but there were no more. So I decided to read them all a second time.

Keep in mind that when I read them the first time, I was not reading these Shadow pulp adventures in chronological order. I was just reading them as I acquired them… in a random order. Often I would be reading about a serial regular, let’s say Miles Crofton, for example, when I hadn’t read the story that introduced him to the series. When I was reading my first couple-dozen stories, I didn’t understand how various things fit into the series. Did the explosive “Devil’s Whisper” appear in most of the stories, or not? Where was The Shadow’s autogiro that I had read about in a previous story? All these questions were gradually answered as I made my way through the pulp series in a somewhat haphazard order. And so once I had finished reading all 325 of them, it seemed to make sense to read them again, and flesh out those reviews, now that I had the full picture.

So it was that in late 2003 I started reading The Shadow stories for a second time. And this time around, I was able to add to my written reviews of the stories, now that I could put them all in the proper historical context. Each review was updated and posted to my Shadow in Review website. And the entire project was completed in the Spring of 2015. Every Shadow story had been read twice and reviewed in detail.

Popular Publications

What about pulps other than The Shadow, you may ask. The world of pulps opened up for me in 2012 when I started working with Radio Archives on their huge pulp ebook project. Up until that point my exposure to pulp stories was pretty much limited to The Shadow and Doc Savage. In late 2011, Radio Archives acquired the license to produce ebooks and audiobooks for the Popular Publications line of pulps. And over the next three years I produced 600 ebooks for them. That really opened up my horizons and exposed me to a wide variety of pulp material.

All of a sudden I was reading The Spider, a direct competitor of The Shadow. I loved it! The Spider was a pumped up version of The Shadow… The Shadow on steroids. And then there was the weird menace of G-8 and His Battle Aces, not to mention the adventures of Operator 5.

Popular Publications had an amazing stable of pulp titles. You want yellow peril stories? You’d find them in Dr. Yen Sin and The Mysterious Wu Fang. War stories? How about Captain Combat or Dare-Devil Aces? Futuristic war stories? Call in Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds. Westerns? There’s always The Pecos Kid. A Doc Savage clone? You can’t beat The Secret Six. For the horror and weird-menace fan there was Dime Mystery Magazine, Horror Stories and Terror Tales. Anti-hero? How about Doctor Death? I even read a few Rangeland Romances and Sports Novels.

And that brings me to the present. I’ve read every Shadow story published and nearly all of the Doc Savage tales. I’ve been exposed to the wide variety of pulps from Popular Publications. And all this familiarity with pulp writing has led me to see the pulpishness in many other things. And this blog will point them out in their various forms. From the actual pulp stories of the old magazines to the pulpiness of current novels to movies and serials to old radio shows… you never know where it will turn up. That’s pulp!