I have killed a thousand men. In the dark alleys of small towns I have waylaid and slugged them; on the foggy
streets of sleeping cities I have clubbed and knifed them; in the dens of the tenderloin and the hideouts of gangsters I have shot them in cold blood; on the rolling pampas of the Argentine I have murdered them with my bola; on our own Western plains I have fanned my six-gun; aboard ships on every sea, in waterfront dives of every port, in tall city buildings and in quiet suburban homes, I have wrenched from my victims their last agonized cries, watched expressions of incredulity spread across their tortured faces. I have killed all these men in all these places- for a penny a word.
The Pulp writer’s lament known as “Penny a Word” (The American Mercury, March 1936) is a mystery. The author signed it anonymous. I love a good mystery so I looked for clues.
The essay gives a wonderfully accurate view of what the life of a penny-a-worder was. The lamenting author talks about how you don’t have to worked too hard to get it, thinking you’ll refine your skills, then move on to slicks or book publishing. Only, you never do. When you try to write “good” the Pulp creeps in and ruins it. He tells how he managed to get ahead enough to afford two weeks off to write a slick. He couldn’t do it:
…but before the fortnight is over I always discover ingrown pulp habits in my work that would require months to eradicate. Then, discouraged by the enormity of the new task and the possibility of no immediate remuneration, I gratefully return to the trough.
The real challenge for the pulpster isn’t getting in, it is being able to change what you write on a dime. Editors get fired, move on, formats change on a whim, what is hot one day is cold the next. The professional pulpster is able to switch gears and adapt quickly. It is the difference between eating or starving. The penny a worder talks about this and other challenges in the first draft only world of the Pulps.
Let’s get back to how I figured out who wrote this. He left some substantial crumbs to follow. The one I latched onto was he sold one piece to Submarine Stories. This Pulp was actually Navy Stories, renamed for three issues in 1930. That gave me a small number of writers to look at. Some I could eliminate immediately simply because they hadn’t written much. The writer I was looking for was a pro with a long list of credits. This narrowed the field down to the following high-production pros: Samuel Taylor Moore, C. M. Miller, Guy Fowler, J. R. Johnson, Captain George Fielding Eliot, Bob duSoe, John Dorman, Jay J. Kalez, Victor Rousseau, Syl MacDowell, Allan R. Bosworth, William E. Poindexter and Joe Archibald.
That was still a number of names. Fortunately, the penny-a-worder said this: “even one thrilling gem for an ill-fated
publication called Submarine Stories“. He had written only one. This eliminated any author with two or more stories in that Pulp.
There were more clues:
…I wrote stories of war in the air, although I had never been within fifty feet of a military aeroplane; I wrote a series of pampas thrillers on the basis of reading one travel book; and I turned out Western thrillers without reading any book. When the editors wanted gangster stories, I produced them; and pseudo-science stories, too, and horror stories, voodoo stories, Northwest Mounted Police stories…
The author also mentioned writing for Blue Book.
At this point Allan R. Bosworth looked very promising. Only one submarine story, a Blue Book entry and he was even in the ISFDB for Science Fiction (pseudo-science stories) but there was just one problem. The SF entry was dated 1941 for John W. Campbell’s Unknown. This piece was written in 1936. It wasn’t Bosworth.
Another aspect of this Pulp Writer’s Lament was the knowledge that he would never break out of the Pulps, never write any books for a regular publisher. The fate of the penny-a-worder is grim. To have to constantly grind out what you write as editorial whim changes. He talks of becoming an editor instead:
The older editor is less adaptable: by the time he reaches his middle forties, even though a congenital pulpster, he can hardly retain judgment, discrimination, and enthusiasm for new policies, after reading the billionth repetition of the same hoary asininity. The fine edge of enthusiasm and freshness has been blunted forever, usually during his apprenticeship as an assistant.
This suggests our writer is not a young man. The truth is, if the writer is who I suspect, he was around 57 when he wrote this. He is not one of the younger writers of the 1940s and 50s Pulps but one of that crew who wrote for soft weeklies in the 10s and 20s. He wasn’t done yet in 1936 but he can see his fate:
I am one of those disillusioned hack authors whose hopes lie somewhere back in the dim golden years when everyone believed in self-expression.
I believe he is Victor Rousseau (1879-1960). The clues all tally. He wrote SF in the early years, with Messiah in the Cylinder (Everybody’s Magazine, 1917). He wrote Northerns, probably the genre he is best remembered for, like Fruit of the Lamp (Argosy, February 1918). His Westerns include “Cross-Trails to Paradise” (Ranch Romances, February 1934). His Submarine Stories entry was the singular “Challenge of the U-212” (July 1930). His Blue Book sales include a series of stories about the St. Lawrence Riverway, beginning with “The Voice in the Mist” (September 1914). More importantly, all of his hard cover books were written as Pulp stories first. He never wrote one just for the book publishers.
I have written about Rousseau before. He wrote several things that crossed my radar. Probably the biggest was the first serial for the brand-new Astounding Stories of Super-Science in January 1930. “The Beetle Horde” has a mad scientist trying to destroy the world with giant beetles. I also came across him in the world of Northerns. Some of these were strange Northerns, a personal fav. Lastly, he reprinted a series in Weird Tales about Dr. Ivan Brodsky, a scientific ghostbreaker. He even wrote one new story for the series, “The Case of the Jailer’s Daughter” (Weird Tales, September 1926).
In 1935, Bernarr Macfadden, a powerful Pulp publisher had let Rousseau go from his stable of writers. Rousseau would spend the next fifteen years writing for the lowest of the magazines, the Spicy Pulps. He would do this until 1950, before fading off into Pulp oblivion, a fate he knew was destined. I have to wonder if this piece wasn’t partly a reaction to Macfadden’s actions. A small revenge, covered by an anonymous by-line, but not so hard to figure out by people in the business. (It is only us readers decades later who must figure these puzzles out.) I don’t think that “Anonymous” was all that full-proof back in 1936 (plausible deniability?).
What finally becomes of worn-out pulpsters is a mystery into which none of us dares delve. We prefer to believe that somehow we will beat the game.
Victor Rousseau, like hundreds of others, lost the game but found a small amount of victory in the stories he left behind. He is not forgotten so long as one reader thrills to his gigantic beetles, his cowboy gun duels or his frozen Arctic hellscapes. The Pulp Writer’s lament remains even if the Mystery is solved.
