Agatha Christie- Pulp writer! Dame Agatha started her career writing short stories for magazines. Many of these stories were reprinted in the Pulps and later magazines. Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the images of Poirot and Miss Marple have thousands of pictorial representation through novel covers, movies, television, etc. Unlike Sherlock, the original magazine images of Christie’s work have faded into the background to be replaced by David Suchet and a plethora of cunning old ladies. The original Sidney Paget illos for Sherlock have remained part of the Holmesian mystique while these early drawings of Hercule Poirot, Parker Pyne and Tommy and Tuppence have not.
Christie tended to sell series of stories in batches to different magazines. These include The Sketch, The Thriller, The Grand Magazine, The Story-teller, The Strand, and in America, Blue Book. Her work would be reprinted occasionally by magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Hutchison’s and The Saturday Evening Post. While Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine re-used her stories for decades.
Once Christie’s fame was set in the book publishing arena, her production of short stories ended in favor of novels. Because of this, the stories mostly appeared in the 1920s just as the Pulps were beginning to replace the magazines of the previous century. By the time the Great Depression would bring on the great age of the Pulps in the 1930s, Christie was a respectable novelist. The Strand Magazine tempted her back in the 1940s .Though imagery of her canon would not come from magazines but books and films, these illustrations are fun to see.
Blue Book
Blue Book was the illustration king of the Pulps. Each page of major serials received an illustration. In this fashion, novels from writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, James Oliver Curwood, and later Robert A. Heinlein, received wonderful images for their works. Short stories usually only got a topper with the title. Blue Book reprinted dozens of Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories.
“The Adventure of the Cheap Flat” (May 1924)
The Strand
The Strand is the magazine that started it all. George Newnes, back in 1891, had the idea for a magazine of fiction and non-fiction, with many illustrations that people could buy at the train station. This idea became the Victorian explosion of fiction known as the Age of the Storytellers. And the author who made it all happen was A. Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories. Not surprisingly, a young Agatha Miller read the tales of Sherlock and Watson and was inspired. It would have to wait until 1940 before Christie would appear in The Strand, but the results gave us The Labours of Hercules.
Others
Artist Unknown
Conclusion: The Slicks
Like all good Pulpsters, Christie graduated from the Pulps to the Slicks. As her fame grew, the Mysteries of Agatha Christie appeared more often in the leading magazines of the day, like the crown jewel, The Saturday Evening Post. No more Pulpy paper for Dame Agatha!
Another literary figure of the 20th century, Tennessee Williams, had his first story published in Weird Tales. Before A Streetcar Named Desire, before The Glass Menagerie, before Suddenly, Last Summer, there was The Vengeance of Nitocris — how PULP!
There were a few others like Lucy Maud Montgomery, Robert S. Carr, Conrad Richter in Ghost Stories.