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

From: James Rogers ( jetan@ionet.net)
Date: 08 Jun 2000


At 01:00 PM 6/8/00 +0300, Juri wrote:
>
>Well, this poses quite a problem: in 1890s there were no pulps, so how can
one say
>that the type of fiction in Strand magazines was akin to pulp. I know that
Argosy
>started in 1896, but was it real pulp at the time? I don't think so. Maybe
you're
>thinking dime novel fiction, which certainly was a forerunner to much of
the pulp
>fiction.

       I don't know how you define real pulp, but 1896 is not the year that Argosy started, but the year it switched to pulp paper and began printing and reprinting adventure fiction.

                  

>> 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?
>
>Haven't read any Talbot Mundy. I know him, of course, but these exotic
adventures
>seem to form a subgenre in pulp fiction that can be and usually is
separated from
>the usual definitions of pulp fiction. Well, there is Edgar Rice
Burroughs, who
>isn't considered a pulp writer, even though he was namely that.

       I don't quite follow what you are talking about here. I am on pretty intimate terms with ERB fandom and we for sure consider him a pulp writer. In fact, he sold only one slick story in his life. Tony Goodstone's excellent anthology _The Pulps_ opens with an ERB story. Some of the
"pulpiest" of the pulps.....such as Fiction House's Jungle Stories ....were devoted exclusively to imitations of ERB and H. Rider Haggard. These
"exotic adventures" are extremely collectible. That they are not pulps will come as a huge shock at Pulpcon this summer. You surely are aware that most of Robert E. Howard falls into this niche? Likewise, Caz's _The Pulp Collector_ is devoted exclusively to this type of story. If you define these exotic adventures out of pulp then we have probably defined Argosy and All-Story out of pulp as well, since these stories were, along with westerns, the mainstay of those publications.

>
>> 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.
>
>Agatha Christie? John Dickson Carr? They were published in pulp magazines,
would
>you consider them pulp fiction? Would Tarantino qualify them as pulp
fiction? And
>what about Gorman, Greenberg and Pronzini?
>

    Sure. Black Mask at one time printed nothing but cozy/classic type stories. Are we going to define "pulp" in such a way that Black Mask can't make the cut?

                     James

James Michael Rogers jetan@ionet.net

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