Paul S. Powers, Riding the Pulp Trail (2011)

Review and interview 

This is a much overdue review for this enjoyable collection of Paul Powers’ western stories edited by Laurie Powers. Half of them were previously published during 1947-1953 in various pulp magazines. Six of them were published here for the first time.

They are a varied selection and show Powers at the height of what was a long career writing for the pulps. They are skillfully told stories, some artfully compact and others more leisurely and complex. You can sense in some the demands and constraints of the genre as defined by editors looking for certain kinds of copy for the pages of their magazines. In others, you can see him pushing against its limits, allowing story and character to unfold in unexpected directions.

Economy. The first two stories in the collection are short and streamlined and share the same narrative elements while seeming to be very different. In both of them, a pair of friends is menaced by several villains attempting to steal something from the two partners. The climax comes during a storm, and a device planted at mid-story (and conveniently forgotten) brings the law to the rescue.

Paul Powers, 1950s

The difference is that one story, “Death is Where You Find It,” is about gold miners whose gold is stolen during an early winter snowfall. The other, “To Steal a Ranch,” is about just that, the theft of a ranch, with its key scene played out in a fierce rainstorm. Each has a neatly embedded surprise.

Romance. Several of these tightly plotted stories include a pretty girl and the quick resolution includes an avowal of love, even a proposal of marriage. “Hangnoose for a Prodigal” manages to work in two romances, one old and one new. In “Judgment Day on Whisky Trail,” a man rescues a girl while revenging the death of a deputy U.S. marshal 15 years ago, and love blooms in the final paragraph.

“Dave,” whispered Libbie O’Day. “Will you take me with you, out of Devil’s Basin?”

“I’d decided about that,” Dana said, tightening his arm around her, “the very first time I set eyes on you.”

In “Buzzards Hate Bullets,” a man discovers that a nose flattened from a kick in the face doesn’t prevent a girl from falling in love with him. And where there’s not a girl in the story, two men provide a feel-good ending of their own by becoming fast friends.

Novelty. The best stories of the collection take you in surprising directions. I liked “By the Neck Until Dead,” a long story featuring Powers’ continuing character, Sonny Tabor. The ever likable and honorable Sonny has a big reward on his head in this story and gets arrested and jailed.

Exciting Western, cover, 1947

Suspense builds as he waits several days for his hanging and finally manages to escape—even as he’s being taken to the scaffold. A nasty gang has stolen a rancher’s money and left him dying. Sonny finds the gang in their hideout and after a shootout returns the money to the rancher’s son before eluding the posse that’s after him and disappearing into the desert.

I also liked “A Pard for Navajo Jack,” in which a deputy bitten by a rattlesnake is saved by the Indian he has been about to arrest. The two men become friends, and the deputy solves a mystery that saves the Indian from the gallows.

In a dark little story called “Yellow Glass,” a man finds his friend dying from a gunshot wound, and his friend’s young wife seems oddly unmoved by what’s happened. The two men had both been attracted to her, and she acts now like she married the wrong one. Did she try to kill her husband? The killer is found in an unexpected way and with a cleverly embedded piece of evidence.

Wrapping up. These stories, in their variety, offer a glimpse of the creative output of a writer who has made a living spinning out popular magazine fiction. They are especially revealing as they show him observing the conventions while pushing their limits.

A word also needs to be said about the handsome design of this book. The typography is elegant, and each story begins with a two-page illustration. Laurie Powers also provides an informative introduction about the process of researching and assembling the collection of stories.

Riding the Pulp Trail is currently available in paper and ebook formats at amazon and Barnes&Noble.

Interview

Laurie Powers

Laurie Powers has generously agreed to spend some time at BITS today to talk about her books and her current research. I’m turning the rest of this page over to her.

How long was this project from the first idea of it to publication?

Well, to be accurate, the whole project took really almost ten years. My aunt and uncle had been continually looking for my grandfather’s stories since 1999. I had reunited with my aunt that summer after 35 years, during my research of my grandfather’s pulp fiction career. That summer they gave me my grandfather’s personal papers and that’s how I came across the manuscript for Pulp Writer, his memoir on being a pulp fiction writer.

But since then, we were discovering that, while my grandfather had been primarily known as a contributor to Wild West Weekly from 1928 to 1943, he had a whole other career writing for magazines such as Thrilling Western, Exciting Western, The Rio Kid Western, Texas Rangers. Almost all of these stories had been published after Wild West Weekly shut down in 1943.

Max Brand, Best Western Stories, 3

Going from early western fiction to this collection of Max Brand stories was something of a jolt. Emotions run high and wide in them, and the sheer intensity of the storytelling knocks your boots off.

Editor William F. Nolan selected seven stories for this slim volume, published in 1987. They originally appeared over a span of only a dozen years, 1927-1939. Three appeared in Western Story Magazine, and one each in Collier’s, Argosy, Blue Book, and American Magazine. So they range in style from pulp to slick.

Just from this sampling, you can sense Brand’s ability to strike different attitudes with the material and play in different keys. If there’s any consistency, it’s the tendency to toggle back and forth between stereotype and the unexpected in the same story. Or to simply switch keys.

While a story races along, the intent seems to be to get you to let down your guard. Then you are surprised by shifts in the plot and character that you didn’t see coming. It’s hard to tell whether Brand does this carelessly or deliberately.

The collection kicks off with “Reata’s Peril Trek,” which first saw the light of day in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine in 1934. Like noir fiction, the story takes place in a godless universe, where risking death for a friend is the highest (and maybe only) virtue and cowardice is the deadliest sin.

March 31, 1934

While the early western novel makes an effort to seem realistic, Brand rejects the historical West for an imagined one. The story has a dream logic that makes sense only in the world of its own contrivance. It is a perilous world, where bad men abound and evil lurks everywhere.

In this story, a criminal mastermind, Dickerman, controls a network of henchmen who do his bidding over a vast area of western terrain. Like a plot device from a Batman episode, they communicate with each other using reflected sunlight from high elevations. In an attempt to rub out the hero, Reata, they trigger a rockslide from which he barely escapes. All of this happens in the opening pages.

But Dickerman is not as evil as they get. A more mysterious figure, known as LaFarge, is even more fearsome. He has a plot afoot to get his hands on a fortune by luring its rightful heir to an isolated house and doing away with him. In the climax of the story, Reata and two compatriots make a daring rescue.

While writing what’s already an exciting page-turner, Brand laces it all with imaginative twists. Reata isn’t just a generic hero. He rides a sturdy but ugly horse named Sue and travels with a small dog, who is a fearless tracker. Instead of a six-shooter, Reata carries a pencil-thin leather lariat in his pocket and uses it with lightning speed and accuracy.

And Dickerman isn’t your generic villain. He is a junk collector and lives in a junk-filled barn. Not so predictably, he’s also a cook of no small skill. Meanwhile, there are sudden strokes of realism, as when Reata rides for two days on a nonstop relay of horses provided by Dickerman. Like any normal person after such physical punishment, Reata is near to collapsing from pain and exhaustion.

Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory

The year was 1955, the 100th anniversary of magazine publisher Street & Smith. I’m guessing some corporate head or figurehead there decided a history of the company was needed. So a writer was hired, and the end result is this curious book.

Since self-published company histories are a fiction genre of their own, it’s hard to know what to take as fact and what’s been left out. Corporate lore is sustained by word of mouth and selective memory. Fact checking seldom plays a role. As written, Fiction Factory is an entertaining and fascinating story, but you keep wondering.

We can be fairly certain that Street & Smith began as two men by that name in pre-Civil War New York on the staff of a weekly newspaper, The New York Weekly Dispatch. As the story goes, they eventually became its owners. Street was the brains behind marketing and sales. Smith masterminded the editorial content. Together they turned the modest newspaper into the publishing powerhouse, Street & Smith.

Mulberry Street, New York City, c1900

Street died in 1883 and Smith’s descendants, who took over when he died in 1887, turned it into an empire. You can tell it’s a company history because it praises the wisdom of the founders, and so much of the book is about the success (and occasional failure) of their business decisions.

On the one hand, there were the promotional and operational innovations that kept them a step ahead of competitors. On the other were the editorial practices that lured the best writers into the fold and got them writing what a vast audience of readers wanted to read.

Ormond Smith (son of founder Francis Smith) is portrayed as a man of refined taste who nevertheless had an instinct for lowest common denominator storytelling. By Reynolds’ account, he was instrumental in defining the popular genres of detective fiction, romance, sea stories, adventure, and westerns. An early movie magazine, Picture-Play, was also his inspiration.

Fantômas

This is for any fans of the Parisian arch-criminal, Fantômas, brainchild of French pulp writers Marcel Allain (1885–1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874–1914). The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles had a screening Thursday night of the third film in this franchise, Le Mort Qui Tue (1913). It drew nearly a full house at the Billy Wilder Theatre. Afterward, there was a panel discussion with screenwriter Howard Rodman, LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan, and pulp scholar Robin Walz.

Fantômas is a kind of Professor James Moriarty, a fiendish psychopath who kills for the apparent pleasure of it. When he is not lurking around in a black mask and black tights, he sometimes assumes the identity of people he has killed. After him, and never quite capturing him, are police detective Juve and a journalist Fandor.

Between them, Allain and Souvestre wrote 43 novels in the series, which was hugely popular. Five of the stories were made into films by Louis Feuillade during 1913-1914 (interrupted by WWI).

As an early feature-length film, Le Mort Qui Tue (The Death that Kills) moves at a slow pace for a thriller. Yet it has a mesmerizing quality as mystery is compounded by mystery. The body of a man strangled in his prison cell suddenly disappears. When a Russian princess is robbed of her pearls, the fingerprint left on her neck turns out to be that of the same man.

Program for the event

Unlike Hollywood films of the period, there is an absence of guns in the story. Victims get chloroformed, drugged, gassed, and (as already mentioned) strangled. One character narrowly escapes being knifed by a man stalking him.

Most scenes are long shots, filmed with a stationary camera, intercut now and then with startling close-ups. While most scenes are interiors, some were shot on the streets of Paris, where motorcar taxis share the road with horse-drawn wagons. In another scene, a man swims for his life in the Seine.

The intertitles, alas, were in French, and my franglais was just about adequate to follow the plot. But I needed the panel discussion afterward for help with the nuances. Prof. Walz, by the way, is an informed enthusiast and has a book on the subject, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Culture in Early Twentieth-Century France. When asked about predecessors of Fantômas, he rattled off a bunch of them.

Live music was provided for the screening, as a musician alternated between an accordion and a piano. It was a recently restored print, provided by the French consulate. If it gets a museum showing near you, it’s worth seeing.

Further reading: Website devoted to Fantômas

Beat to a Pulp, Round 1, Cranmer and Ash, eds.

Pulp fiction is un-American – in the best sense of the word. It sticks its finger in the eye of our over-idealistic national myths. It questions the myth of progress and the myth of the American Dream. Along with one of the characters in Cranmer and Ash’s Beat to a Pulp, Round 1, it insists that things are “going to hell.”

This is easy for me to say, knowing as little as I do about pulp fiction. My hat’s off to folks like Cullen Gallagher, whose informative history of pulp appears at the end of this giant volume of new stories. I don’t even rank as an amateur in this discussion. But it’s hard, as a compulsive reader, not to pitch in my two centavos.

Pulp and Beat. Pulp, as Gallagher points out, is an aesthetic. It can show up in other popular art forms (film noir, punk rock). Its main message is “stop kidding yourself, we’re beat.” It gives the lie to any form of optimism.

Reading these stories, I have found new reason to enjoy the play on words in Cranmer and Ash’s title Beat to a Pulp. The word “beat” here evokes the meaning of the word as Jack Kerouac originally meant it – exhausted, beaten down. He was describing field workers in California. And he was embracing them and their hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth existence as being more fully authentic. (Never mind that he didn't know what he was talking about.)

This admission of defeat is at the heart of the pulp fiction in this collection. It’s an attitude typically charged with fierce anger, chilling anxiety, or wild hilarity. Given the working conditions and the low pay of pulp writers, it’s no mystery where this attitude originated.

That pulp flourished during the Great Depression seems no accident. Laissez-faire capitalism had already dragged the economy through several booms and crashes. It was a system that was always hard on ordinary folks, but the Big One about did us in. Pulp, along with the movies, offered an affordable escape from harsh realities and disillusionment.

Every period since then has had its anxieties. Still, most Americans snap back from jolts to their confidence, and sunny optimism prevails. Until lately. And not surprisingly, pulp has had a renaissance.

Dark vs sunny. Pulp is a walk on the wild side. It offers escape into a world where, ironically, there’s often no escape. It traps you in a locked room with your worst fears. Like the protagonists in Bill Frank’s “Acting Out” or Glen Gray’s “Cannulation,” you find yourself caught in a lose-lose situation. It’s a bad dream with no way out but a hopeless run for your life.

Pulp is honest. It is anti-heroic because heroics are futile. It just says no to happy endings.

Almost always. Sometimes cunning succeeds where heroics fail. And while feel-good endings are rare, justice typically prevails. Pulp dives into that gap between what is dark and sunny in us and comes up with cheap thrills that can be thoroughly enjoyable.

I’m thinking here of a couple stories: Kieran Shea’s “Off Rock” and Anonymous-9’s “Hard Bite.” The cheap thrill in both of them is the opportunity to identify with a killer. Each is about a prisoner, one on an asteroid, the other in a wheelchair. Each of them engineers a kind of freedom for himself that involves taking the lives of others. But the dead deserve their fates, and so justice prevails. Still, the killers in both cases are scarcely superior to their victims. Should things backfire – as they do in one case – we know it was inevitable.

There’s a similar set-up in Evan Lewis’ exciting pirate story, “The Ghost Ship.” Here the reader is immersed in a bloody melee as the merciless pirate captain slashes his way to the hold of a captured ship. There he hopes to find treasure. At some point, we discover, good judgment has left the man, maybe long before the story began. And for his cheering crew, justice is finally served.

So greed and lust for blood (dark) meet generosity and the love of safety (sunny), and there we are suspended between a nightmare and a waking world. And enjoying it. Blood and violence mark many of these stories. The word “blood” appears at least once in eleven of them.

Going, going, gone. Death is a nearly constant theme. Worth mention on this point is Paul Powers’ homage to Ambrose Bierce. His “The Strange Death of Ambrose Bierce” parallels Bierce’s own “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” first published in 1890. And knowing the original story makes the parallels especially haunting. With the hanging of a Confederate sympathizer, it is as if Bierce predicted his own death, as a prisoner of war in Mexico.

James Reasoner’s “Heliotrope” finds another man lingering, he comes to learn, between life and death. His story, set in a hospital in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor has a vintage feel and reads like a 1940s radio play. Patricia Abbott’s wonky take on death, in “Ghostscapes,” involves several blithe spirits who need time to discover that being among the living doesn’t mean they are still alive.

Women. The women in these stories seem to spring full-blown from the unconscious of the writers, most of them male. Rather than modest and well-behaved, they are wild and sexual or downright spooky. Cash Laramie encounters a kind of Spider Woman in the Edward A. Grainger story, “The Wind Scorpion.”

In Nolan Knight’s “At Long Last,” a man with a windfall inheritance picks up a woman at a bar and gives her a good time, flashing his new wealth. King for a day, he goes back to being a loser when she robs him of all of it.

Seventeen-year-old Ryder is the girl-from-hell in Andy Henion’s black farce, “Anarchy Among Friends: A Love Story.” The middle-aged wife of a wealthy old man in Hilary Davidson’s “Insatiable” shares one of her swarthy lovers from time to time with her husband who has appetites of his own.

Suspending disblief. Generally, these stories take place in a closed universe, a dream world with a logic of its own. You have to suspend all your disbelief to accept them on their own terms. Chap O’Keefe’s “The Unreal Jesse James” mixes science fiction with western history, and the effect is whimsical. It doesn’t have connection points with the real world.

On the other hand, the portrayal of tropical parasites and cannibalism in Chris Holm’s “A Native Problem” casts a shadow that doesn’t quite lift when you turn its last page. Though set in 1923, the story reminds us of AIDS and other global diseases still waiting in the wings.

Garnett Elliott’s “Studio Dick,” set in post-war Hollywood, makes telling reference to anti-Semitism. Stephen D. Rogers’ “Pripet Marsh” cuts close to the bone in its portrayal of wartime savagery seemingly countenanced by the availability of high-tech weaponry. Today’s global black market in organs is evoked in the futuristic “Spend It Now, Pay Later” by Nik Morton. Human trafficking is, in fact, the subject of Frank Bill’s “Acting Out.”

So pulp entertains by playing on the shadow side of popular and officially sanctioned myths about the real world. It questions the validity of beliefs about hard work and getting ahead, going by the rules, being a model citizen, the sanctity of human life, human decency, family values, truth, justice, and the American Way.

So, yeah, it’s un-American. It’s not in denial about the human condition. And it’s a safety valve for all our known and unknown fears, as well as an escape from them. For a while we can let ourselves get beat to a pulp without getting bloody in the bargain.

Coming up: Old West glossary, #4