Twenty years ago I made it my mission to write as they did in the old days of Black Mask, Dime Detective and Thrilling Wonder Stories, basically a genre story that moves, focuses on incident but with an eye towards character and background. I wasn’t alone, though it often felt that way. Today we have the term “New Pulp” to define such an attitude and I certainly am not alone. Derrick Ferguson, Joel Jenkins, Jack Mackenzie, Joshua Reynolds, I consider these writers friends as well as inspirations.
I used to use the words “Pulp-descended fiction” and it was the source of RAGE m a c h i n e Books. I wanted to capture that feeling that good Pulp writing gives you. What that really means is I grew up on authors who wrote during the Pulps and those who followed, they too influenced by those five decades of magazine publishing. The world has since moved on, with television and paperback novels, comic books (now called “graphic novels”). Despite this, Pulp remains with us. Not in the packaging but under the surface.
Don’t believe me? What is the fourth highest grossing film of all time? Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a series inspired by Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, which in turn were inspired by comic strips, which in turn were inspired by …(wait for it) The Pulps. One other Star Wars sequel is also in the Top 20. Who else is there? Two Avengers films, both comic book movies– those step-children of the Pulps. Killer dinosaurs, a kid who does witchcraft, cartoons based on fairy tales, and a movie about aliens on a jungle planet. Only two of the twenty don’t involve fantasy of some sort. Only #3, Titantic is clearly non-Pulp with its brash, young hero, beautiful heroine, dark villains and melodramatic love story (wink).
The Pulps have stayed with us in more direct ways as well. The 1960s and 1970s saw a lot of paperbacks being printed, many culled from the pages of old Pulps. The Doc Savage series from Bantam, the ACE Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lancer with Conan, Arkham House with Lovecraft and other Mythosians, etc. These were the books of my youth. This is the foundation upon which I built my own preferences in fiction. I did the University-thing. Read the Jane Austen and the latest uni-crap (I won’t dignify with the title of “fiction”). These added another perspective to literature in general, but it is the older, genre works that have lasted for me. I would rather discuss the smallest tidbit from Weird Tales than any masterwork of the literati. I know that makes me provincial, fannish, unsophisticated, what –have-you. I know my own prejudices and I can live with them.
A few years back I had a chance to meet one of the heroes of my youth, Robert Silverberg. He was Guest of Honour at V-Con in Vancouver, BC. The first book of his I read was Downward to the Earth. It was one of the first Science Fiction books I read after the initial insanity for ERB and REH. Silverberg showed me there was so much more out there. Robert is in his eighties now. (To give that perspective to me, I was born around the time his story “To See the Invisible Man” appeared Worlds of Tomorrow. He was urbane, witty, and just a little sad at that convention. You could see him grit his teeth (just a little bit) as he waded through “The Future of Science Fiction” panel. How many of those has he done, I wonder? But always the gentleman, he made it fresh just the same.
One thing that makes me laugh when I think about it is that most of the authors who I venerate are my father’s age (men like Silverberg) or my grandfather’s age (Burroughs or Lovecraft) or even my great-grandfather’s age (Kipling or Doyle). When a man is young he likes to feel he is rebelling against the past but if the authors you read are any indication… At my age, I’ll leave the rebelling to my sons.
As a writer I always list four authors as stylists. If you are going to write to entertain you can do no better than Louis L’Amour, Erle Stanley Gardner, Robert E. Howard and George Simenon. The quality of their writing is such that I do not care what genre they write in. If they wrote it, I’ll read it. And at least three of them wrote in many genres. Louis L’Amour is a master at burying detail while keeping the story going. Howard wrote with such vitality that he jumps from the page. Gardner and Simenon are paragons of economy. No waste. Emulate them, but write your own kind of story. (Elmore Leonard’s rules are also good.)
In terms of content I would list different writers. H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien (whom Mervyn Peake called “that old wind bag”) and Clark Ashton Smith were all less stylistically examples I would offer. Each had his own idiosyncratic style that suited his needs. I do not believe as some critics do, that their prose is abysmal. They all wrote to their own purpose (and succeed despite the difficulty of their style.) Copying them as a writer will only lead to pastiche, and I don’t recommend this. What each writer did excel at was creating a vision of a world, a mythology, a milieu in which to place stories. This is a great gift than mere clean prose. The ultimate goal is, of course, to have both, a fascinating world told in clearly understood words.
