Welcome to my Universe…
I did not set out to create a united
world with my stories set in the 1930s but it is not easy for me to ignore
constructs and previous research when I write new material. And in the process
of writing one story in one ‘genre’ I often see story possibilities in other
directions. For instance, in writing a detective tale for Dr. Shadows I see the
possibilities of a horror tangent that would be more appropriate to the
Skullmask, etc.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
First came my love for the period and the
writing style born in it: depression area pulp writing!
Pulp magazines were so named because of
the cheap wood pulp they were produced on. They reigned supreme from the 1920s,
well in to the late 1940s with their sensationally garish colored covers and
daring purpled prose within.
It was an era of covers painted in bold strokes and
larger than life characters painted with equally bold strokes of the typewriter
keys. It was a world that has faded into the mists of time; devoured by and
then reborn into its own offspring, the paperback novel.
Black Mask, the high watermark in
gumshoes, gave us Phillip Marlow, Same Spade, the Continental Op, Race Williams, Oscar Sail and
countless variations of the first, & truly, American deductive champions.
The Hard-boiled Private Eye.
Meanwhile (as they say), back on the
magazine racks, a phenomenon occurred: the Hero Pulp was started by Street and
Smith publications; a company with a long history in periodicals (including
dime novel hero Nick Carter.) The company decided to embrace the new medium,
radio, with the
Street & Smith hour, where a narrator would read stories from their
detective magazines as an extended commercial for the book. As a gimmick, they
named the narrator ‘The Shadow’, with no thought to any other effect
than to make the stories a bit spookier. No biggie, or so they thought.
Soon however, letters poured into the
publisher wanting to know more about this mysterious host. The publisher, W. A.
Ralston and Editor John Nanovic, quickly decided to rush a magazine titled, “The Shadow” into production to protect
a potentially lucrative property.
They had no idea who or what the Shadow
was, but they knew just the right guy to write it; a magician/journalist cum
pulp writer named Walter Gibson.
It was the perfect marriage of man and
material: Gibson (under the house name of Maxwell Grant), created a
fascinatingly dark & mysterious crusader who, with his army of aides and
agents, fought a constant war against the forces of gangdom.
The magazine was an instant hit selling
out month after month so consistently that Street & Smith began to print
issues every other week!
None equaled the heights the Shadow
achieved in the ensuing decade of the hero pulp!
Street & Smith succe eded lightening
in a bottle a second time in 1933 with a counterpoint to their dark Avenger in
a bronze crusader named Doc Savage.
No lurker in the shadows this time, the
good Doctor was a science based good guy who did his combat with evil in the
naked light of public exposure. Again the perfect scribe was found to
write/create him in Lester Dent, a former telegrapher, inventor and adventurer.
Many lesser Titans followed in Doc’s
wake—
Capt.
Hazzard,
The
Avenger,
Thunder
Jim Wade,
Captain
John Fury, The Skipper etc. but none held a candle to the
metallic man’s success.
Just as the dime novel was eclipsed by
the pulp the magazines evolved into digests and paperback books.
Many pulp characters appeared directly,
or strongly influenced, their comic book off-springs as well. Most notably the
Man of Steel Superman owes much to the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage.
A few of the pulps limped along as
digests and a vast number of pulp stories, novel length and the short stories,
were reprinted into paperback form. Thus, an era was disappearing.
This is where I come into the story
directly. In 1964 Bantam Books began to reprint the Doc Savage books with
dynamite James
Bama covers (the pulp had ceased publication in 1949) aiming, & rightly
so, at the growing science fiction market. It caused a resurrection of many of its pulp brethren and inspired scores of
imitators and pastiches.
I made up my mind then to visit that time
through characters that lived there but not someone else’s characters. There is
a whole school of writing that ascribes to writing new stories of old (public
domain) characters, which is well and good when continuing the official
continuity such as Will Murray has done with his exceptional Doc Savage
stories—but otherwise, I feel it is a little sacrilegious and somewhat like
poaching. (I’ve since written in a couple of stories that continue other
people’s characters-even working on a Lester Dent pre-Doc Savage character
following in my hero’s footsteps but, all were ‘sanctioned’ by publishers or
the writer’s estates.)
I sought to create characters that could
have graced the newsstand in the golden decade of the ‘30s and would have fit
in as ‘just one of the guys
My first original-and one might say
‘gateway’-character was firmly in a bronze shadow- The Granite Man, Dr. Shadows
( whose given name was Anton Chadeaux). He was a ‘science hero’ with purely
heroic motives who owed as much to George Chance-The Green Ghost, and the Green
Lama (being he is Buddhist) as Doc.
I chose the year 1937 as the starting
point for my pulp-verse because in my estimation it was a lynchpin year when
the post war years and the depression was changing into what some might call
‘the modern era’, when a certain innocence was to be lost in the horror of
WWII.
I was not content to visit the era with
only one original pulp hero, however. I cast my eye toward the Shadow, the
Spider and his ilk (and a little to the comic strip Phantom) and created my
generational dark hero “The Skullmask.’ The Skullmask is really the one ‘hero’
who is many, for any who where the mask in a quest for just vengeance acquire
the memories of all those who have worn it before.
Both of those characters I placed firmly
in a ‘real world’ that I meticulously researched, but it was a ‘real world that
co-existed with the classic pulp characters I loved. Not that they interact
directly with ‘famous’ folk of times past, but these ‘legitimate’ period
characters are acknowledged as readily as historical persons.
I could not stop with a hero and a dark
avenger, however, because the newsstands in the ‘golden era’ had a great
variety of fare and I wanted to explore other genres.
One of those genres was the Dime Mystery ‘reporter of the unusual’. Moxie Donovan is one of a long line of
reporter heroes that stretch all the way back to O’Henry’s 1905 short story
“Calloway’s Code” and up to Kolchak the Nightstalker. Intrepid reporters were a
natural for the pulp scribes to pen since they knew the world of the fourth
estate having, many of them, been reporters before they turned to ‘honest’
fiction writing.
My hero was out to scoop the other papers
but gave us a two for one journalistic good guy and the reporter of the unusual
in Moxie Donovan and his eventual mate Maxi, who was a showgirl at the series
start.
I did not stop with those three series.
There was still the hardboiled
adventurer-in-search-of-redemption mold to be explored. Such a character that
might have graced the pages of Argosy or Adventure. That fellow is Gideon Synn,
the ivory adventurer. Of course, I had to give even that hero a little ‘spin’
so he has something no other pulp hero had as a regular feature in his tales-
his sister! They are the first crime fighting sibling duo that I know of.
Another ‘genre’ excursion was the
Sovereign Wolf detective tales. Sovereign is a Native American marshal who
fights crime with a different attitude. In a sense he spans the western and
‘odd’ detective categories.
I’m not done yet, of course, there is
Declinn Blayde a frontiersman, Gideon Rizk a swashbuckling pirate and Josiah
Silence, and a western bounty hunter (written under my Gideon Teel
nom-de-plume), Though these stories predate the 30’s milieu they might have
appeared in pulps of the era.
Then, of course, I have the contemporary stories
with Jon Shadows, son of my 1930s hero and Deacon Furie, S.A. S. soldier.
All these characters I mention inhabit the same world,
either meeting, acknowledging or mentioning each other in a large patchwork of
stories.
Mind you, these tales are not part of an
alternate timeline or series, like my “The Cowboy and the Conqueror” or Dr.
Argent or the Hairy Khetar Time Cop tales or Renfairies stories, but a self
contained in a ‘straight line,’ where any ‘major events’ outside of our normal
history are ‘secret and don’t change the ‘big picture.’
So there you have it my ‘pulpverse’ that
has evolved into and will continue grow, as my literary ‘world’. I am sure as I
explore other corners of my cluttered mind and discover new facets of real
history to exploit.
I’m sure I’m not done…
