Barry Traylor takes a turn answering our 3 pulp questions this week.
Barry received the Rusty Hevelin Service Award at this year’s PulpFest for his contributions to the pulp community. He’s one of the members of the hard-working PulpFest committee, and coordinates the annual auction at the convention.
And when he’s not busy prepping for PulpFest (and reading the pulps, no doubt), Barry is a participant over on PulpMags list at Yahoo Groups.
It was great to meet him in person at PulpFest 2014, though I wish that we’d had more time to visit. You can get a sampling of his knowledge and humor listening to Pulp Event Podcast featuring the panel discussion “1939: Science Fiction’s Boom Year.”
Let’s hear from Barry.
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3 Pulp Questions
3 Pulp Questions is an opportunity for you to get to know fellow pulp collectors a bit better and, maybe, introduce you to pulps, authors, stories or characters that you haven’t explored.[/box]
1. How were you introduced to the pulps?
Almost ashamed to admit it but my sister had a boyfriend that read Amazing Stories and he was a big fan of the Richard S. Shaver stories. He gave me a couple of issues and that was my introduction.
I am amazed that I became a fan of science fiction after reading one of the Shaver yarns. That would have been around 1953, just before that magazine went to digest size. All through junior high I was using my lunch money to buy Imagination, Imaginative Tales, Marvel Science Fiction and many more of the digest sized SF magazines.
Later in high school I began reading Astounding, Galaxy and F&SF. I did not begin to collect SF pulps until I discovered that Robert A. Heinlein began his writing career writing for the pulp-sized Astounding. Further information led to magazines like Unknown and the book by Tony Goodstone called “The Pulps” made we aware of Weird Tales, Black Mask, the Weird Menace pulps and so many more.
2. What is your most prized pulp possession?
Actually all of them. Argosy, Blue Book, Short Stories, Top Notch, Adventure, Detective Tales (the Popular Publications one), Dime Mystery, Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder, Startling, Thrill Book (I have one). The list goes on and on. It is impossible for me to choose just one title as I love them all.
3. What overlooked (pulp magazine, story, author, character, or series) would you recommend to pulp fans and why?
This is a tough question for me as I can’t call Fredric Brown overlooked. But for any that are not aware his body of work I can’t think of many writers that wrote for the pulps that could write both science fiction and mystery as well as he.
A pulp writer that is perhaps a bit more obscure is Franklin H. Martin who wrote for the Weird Menace pulps but also created a character called Malachi Gunn that ran in the Popular Publication title Detective Tales. It is very difficult to find anything about Franklin H. Martin on the Internet. Science fiction from the pulp years has been covered quite well, not so much for the detective pulps. As far as I know no one has reprinted any of the Malachi Gunn stories.
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