Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Nits Picked While You Wait....

From: Ray Skirsky ( rskirsky@qualcomm.com)
Date: 07 Jun 2000


At 09:32 PM 6/7/00 +0300, Juri wrote:

>And I just thought that we discussed why every popular book seems nowadays to
>be pulp fiction! As for Fu Manchu, I'd say that Sax Rohmer's influences
>are way
>beyond pulp, namely in Conan Doyle and Guy Boothby and that kind of exotic
>adventure writers.

I have some 1890s Strand magazines, and they look like pulps, but the paper was slick. The type of fiction in them is more akin to American pulps than to American slicks. I think that the greater wealth of England at the time permitted a better grade of paper. If you don't consider Sherlock Holmes pulp, then what about Prof. Challenger?

As for other exotic adventure, I think that it's pure pulp, it's just that the market structure in England was different than the US. I'm aware that Fu Manchu's US appearances were in slicks (Colliers, I believe) but were his adventure tales (or Kipling's) all that different from, say, Talbot Mundy?

The direction I'm going here is that I think that my definition of pulp is that, if it was written in the time of the pulps, and it wouldn't look out of place serialized in Adventure, or Argosy, or Thrilling Detective, or Weird Tales, or Short Stories, or, .... Then it is pulp fiction, regardless of where it appeared. After the pulp era, well, if you could transport it back to the pulp era, would it fit in?

YMMV,

Ray

P.S. The Caine Mutiny was considered trashy back in it's day. Pulp? Probably not.

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