Jack Mackenzie is at it again. His latest project is a series of Pulp hero novels called Wild Inc. The first book is The Shattered Men. I talked to him about the series and all things Pulp recently. Read an excerpt here.
G. W. Thomas: What was it about Pulp fiction that drew you to create this series? Is 2020 the right time to go back to 1930?
Jack Mackenzie: Well, anyone who has a romanticized vision of the 1930’s is in denial of the reality of that decade. The 1930’s was characterized by the Great Depression which meant a lot of hardship and privation and ended with total war in Europe. In that respect I don’t think it’s a time that anyone really wants to revisit. However, because of the depression it was a time when people were actively looking for an escape from their everyday lives and that was what led to the popularity of the hero pulps.
In 2020 with the pandemic and worries about the economy, well… one doesn’t hope for the worst, obviously, but if it happens that people are looking for an inexpensive escape from their bleak reality, then they have a lot of choices from video games to comic books to Netflix or Disney +. Writing a pulp inspired e-book represents one tiny choice in a sea of choices.
GWT: The inspiration for the look of the series is obviously the old Doc Savage novel from Bantam, not the old Walter M. Baumhofer Pulp magazines. Is this really more of a 1960s thing?
JM: When I started this project (and it was a long time ago) I really wanted to reproduce the old Pulp Hero magazines. I wanted to create a replica of an old pulp magazine that could have sold on newsstands alongside any issue of Doc Savage or The Shadow or The Avenger. I wanted to create an object that would physically resemble an old pulp magazine down to the pulpy paper and the staples. If I could have I would have wanted to make something that would look, feel and smell like an old pulp magazine. I wanted to have illustrations (I even completed a few!) and backup stories and other features. I wanted it to be a true collector’s item.
Alas, my dreams were more grandiose than my abilities and they ran far ahead of me. I hadn’t even written the novel, let alone all the other material. So, once I had the novel written I decided that maybe taking a page from the Bantam paperbacks of the 1960’s -1970’s might be a more manageable approach. It would also be easier to translate into an e-book which, realistically, is where most sales of the book will come from.
Maybe one day I will re-release a Collector’s version with all of that, but for now, I’m just concentrating on getting the book out.
GWT: Lester Dent used to bang out the old Doc Savages in a month on a typewriter. In fact, he usually had several going at once. What was your writing process like?
JM: Lester Dent seems to be the gold standard for pulp adventure writing. Not only for his structure (his guide to putting together a pulp story is revered by most New Pulp writers today) but his speed was tremendous. I’ve heard he could pound out 10,000 word a day or more, which is phenomenal! He could pound out a Doc Savage novel in a week.
Unfortunately, I’m not Lester Dent. This book has been percolating in my head for almost 15 years and it has taken more than ten years to actually write the damned thing, which, needless to say, I’m not really proud to admit. I have managed some days where I can write 5000 to 8000 words a day, but my output is not consistent. I have had other novels written faster. DEBT’S PLEDGE and DEBT’S HONOUR were both written in less time than this has been on the go. Hopefully now that I have the first one down the rest will go a lot faster.
GWT: The old Pulps had some elements that would never fly today: sexism, racism, etc. How did you approach updating the scene without losing all the flavor of the old stuff? Did you think of setting the novels in the 1930s?
JM: That’s one of the reasons that I wanted to do this was to take the pulp novel structure and see if it could fly today. I had briefly considered setting it in the 1930’s, but the research alone would have exhausted me. I don’t live in the 1930’s. I live today.
One of the big inspirations for this was the British TV series SHERLOCK, which managed to update the Sherlock Holmes stories to a modern setting. It’s an idea that’s been tried before but usually with some sort of time travel twist that brings the Victorian era detective into modern times. SHERLOCK did away with that and just posited the idea that Holmes and Watson could have been modern men. Watson was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. As it turned out we had a modern war in Afghanistan and the modern Watson was a veteran of that war and suffering from PTSD. The modernization worked so well it was a real revelation to me and I thought that I could do the same thing with a pulp adventure.
Even now with the recent announcement of a Doc Savage television series, there has been a lot of talk among Doc Savage groups about their fears that the adaptation will bring Doc into the twenty-first century. Most fans feel that this will ruin the spirit of the original adventures and, honestly it will. Shane Black wanted to make a movie with Dwayne Johnson set in the 1930’s, but the studio wanted to modernize it. Now the studio is trying to develop a version for television and I guarantee it absolutely will swap out races and genders, modernize it to give it pop culture references and a rock and roll soundtrack.
Most Doc fans for the most part don’t want to see that happen, but I got to thinking, instead of updating old characters and trying to shoehorn them into the 20th century, why not create a new crew for the modern day audience. So I created a gender and racially diverse group and set them loose in the modern world but tried to keep the pulp adventure sensibility.
GWT: Being an updated version of Pulp, what are some scenarios that you can use that the old Pulpsters never could? The 21st Century must offer some special opportunities…
JM: Obvious things are computers and the interconnectedness that the world exists in today. In the 1930’s Doc Savage’s inventions were mind boggling. Today they’re commonplace and technology is evolving faster than a lot of us can keep up with. Trying to have these adventures stay technologically cutting edge is a challenge. But also a lot of social changes have happened since the 1930’s. The casual racism of the old pulps is obviously something I’m going to leave in the past. Same with sexism. And sex for that matter. Most pulp heroes turn red in the face when they are faced with anything that smacks of sexuality, but that’s something else that has become commonplace today. Pulp adventurers of yesteryear were like young boys who don’t want to get “girl-germs”. That, I assume, appealed to an audience that skewed towards young males. Today sex is a lot less mysterious and that has to be dealt with in an adult way.
The other thing is language. Pulp heroes tended to limit their exclamations to phrases like “Blazes!” or “I’ll be Superalmagamated!” For me I couldn’t write modern characters who don’t partake in the modern vernacular. My main character, Harry Calhoun, is a young half East Indian, half Scottish man who has, up until now, been a petty criminal. It didn’t make sense that he would say something like: “Jiminy Cricket!” when things got going. So he curses in the same way that a lot of people of that age do. I try not to let it get too out of hand but I have to write it in a way that sounds right to my ears. And where it has to happen I try to make it humorous.
GWT: The original Shadow series had 325 novels. Doc Savage had 181. I assume you plan on writing a lot of these. How do you write many of them without repeating yourself? Are you planning on having ghosts write some of them?
JM: That’s a real good question. I hope to have a few of them at least. I have the plot for the next one and I have some of it written. I have an idea for a third one. But then, this all depends on whether anyone likes this first one. If it sinks like a stone I might have to reconsider. I hope it flies and if it does I will write more. As for repeating myself, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Try to write another that is similar enough to the rest so as to be recognized as a series, but not too similar that it’s just a re-hash of what I’ve written before. I guess I’ll have to let you know.
As for ghosts… I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. But what I prefer is to invite other authors in if they are interested in playing in my sandbox. That, I think, is a better approach than hiring ghost writers. Jack Mackenzie is a pen-name, but it’s not a house name. If someone else wanted to write a Wild Incorporated adventure, then I would want them to get the credit for doing so. And it would be (pardon the pun) wild to see what other voices would bring to what I’ve set up here.
GWT: A lot of this book takes place on the streets of New York. Have you been to New York?
JM: Actually no and that was another thing that I worried about. I could research as much as I wanted but I was worried that my New York scenes would fall flat. It’s not like I could do like TV shows do today, show an establishing shot of the Manhattan skyline and then go film on the streets of Vancouver (a city with which I am familiar).
I ended up reaching out to Airship 27’s Ron Fortier who put me in touch with novelist Terrence McCauley, a crime writer who lives in New York. He gave me some very good advice about New York streets and alleyways (much of which I ended up having to ignore for story reasons, so that’s on me, not him). Another author who was of immense help was author Derrick Ferguson. He’s the author of the Dillon novels (which are fantastic, by the way) and he helped me out with on the ground street directions.
I ended up naming a character after Derrick and I put Terrence into a kind of “cameo role” in the chapter that takes place in Grand Central Station. It was the least that I could do to thank them for their help.
GWT: Thanks for giving us a sneak peek at this new series. It looks to be a lot fun.