Frank Gruber read his first book at age 9, and wrote his
first book at age 11. By the time his career was over, he had
wrote over 400 stories, 53 novels, and 65 screenplays. He
states that it was his intent to become a writer from that
early age and from then on his committment never waivered. He
started with the popular Horatio Alger novels of rags to
riches, later developing a taste for more highbrow
literature. He began writing stories but couldn't sell them,
even after buying a book listing places to market his work,
and submitting and resubmitting his work. The going rate was
a penny a word, but there were a hundred Sunday School papers
that paid one-tenth that amount. He submitted to them and
finally managed to sell his first story in 1927 for $3.50.
Frank Gruber was now a professional writer. In The Pulp
Jungle, Gruber gives a rare and fascinating first-hand
account of what it was like writing for the pulp magazines
through their heyday in the thirties.
Soon after the story was bought, and based on his status as a
published writer, he got a job as an editor of a small town
farm paper. A few months later he moved on to a better
editorial position on an Iowa paper. Throughout both these
jobs he continued to write fiction on his own. He married and
worked this job until the paper went bankrupt in 1932.
Because of the Depression, he couldn't find a job, so he
decided to become a full-time writer. Between 1932 and 1934
he wrote 174 pieces and sold 107. The pulps are one of the
few businesses that thrived during the Depression, and they
were his prime target. By then the pulps had branched into
special interests, and Gruber tried them all, writing for
sports, romance, and detective pulps, but he would write
anything that would sell. He sold an article on deworming
chickens to an agricultural journal.
New York City was the main publishing center for the pulps.
Street & Smith was at 14th Street and 7th Avenue, and
Munsey was further downtown. Together with other publishers,
they put out around 150 pulps in 1934. The king of the pulps
was Black Mask, followed by Adventure, Argosy, and Detective
Fiction Weekly. They pulps paid as much as five cents a word
and as little as a third a cent. Gruber estimates 300 writers
in the city, a thousand others doing regular mail-in, and an
indeterminate number of other amateur writers trying to break
into the field. In 1934, Gruber sent his wife to visit her
parents and he moved to New York to make his fortune. He had
a typewriter, a suitcase, and sixy dollars.As he stated, "I
had one thing else... the will to succeed." Obviously, all
those Horatio Alger books had their effect.
He was not an instant success in New York, and he went
through hard times. He describes how he made tomato soup for
free at the Automat with a bowl, a shot of hot water, ketchup
packets, and free crackers. He was locked out of his hotel
room for nonpayment and spent the night riding the subway
back and forth. He finally got the break he needed when his
agent got a job as the editor for a new Ziff-Davis magazine
on gambling. He wrote eight articles for the first edition.
When he produced a 5,500 word war story overnight for editor
Roger Terrill, the tide had turned. All of a sudden, it
seemed like everything he wrote was accepted, with the
editors requesting more. His income went from $400 in 1934 to
$10,000 in 1935.
Grown bold with his success, in early 1935 Gruber requested a
meeting with Joe Shaw, editor of Black Mask, and was granted
an interview. He states that Shaw was charming and courteous
and invited Gruber to submit a story. Although it was not
accepted, Shaw discussed the story with him for a long time,
pointing out his reasons for rejecting it. Gruber says that
he wrote story after story and revised them endlessly. Shaw
rejected them all with the deepest of regret, and always
pleaded for another one. Shaw was fired in 1936 when the
magazine dropped into the red in 1936 and he refused to take
a pay cut. Shaw never sold a story to Black Mask while Shaw
was editor. Fanny Ellsworth, formerly of Ranch Romance
magazine, took over for Shaw. Gruber had successfully sold to
Fanny before, and over the next three years he was published
in Black Mask 14 times. He went to the 1936 Black Mask
Christmas party with Carroll John Daly, Lester Dent, Steve
Fisher, and Roger Torrey.
He describes Cornell Woolrich as an introvert who rarely got
out, but he recalls a night that he and Steve Fisher got
Woolrich to go to a party. Fanny complained to Gruber the
next day that Woolrich had come into her office in the
morning raging about why Gruber, Fisher, and Torrey were
being paid almost three times what Woolrich was getting for a
story. They had apparently got drunk and told him that lie
the night before. Gruber tells how he called at Woolrich's
apartment one night to ask him out to dinner and Woolrich's
mother gave him hell and refused to call Woolrich to the
phone.
Gruber recalls Carroll John Daly as a short thin man with bad
teeth. He rarely drank and couldn't hold his liquor when he
did. Although not at all like his character Race Williams,
Gruber says that Daly liked to talk like him. One story
Gruber tells is how Daly got drunk and was arrested with a
.45 in the city, which was a serious felony. Gruber played
bridge with him frequently. Daly started out as an usher and
worked his way up to assistant manager of a movie theater.
Writing for Black Mask from 1922 through 1940, his work was
hated by the editors but loved by the readers. When the pulp
days were over, Gruber and Daly lived four miles apart, and
got together often to visit, play bridge, and reminisce about
days gone by.
Gruber mentions Fred MacIsaac, an author that Gruber had
great respect for before he even started writing for the
pulps. MacIsaac introduced Gruber to Thomas Wolfe at a New
York City cafe. Gruber said that he sat there for three hours
listening to Thomas Wolfe describe how good he was and why.
MacIsaac committed suicide a few weeks later. Unknown to
Gruber, MacIsaac had not sold a story in over six months and
was broke.
In 1943 at Warner Brothers Studio, Gruber met Max Brand and
they soon became good friends. He was a big man, about six
foot three, and weighed close to 200 pounds, not an ounce in
fat. Max wrote like clockwork. Every day, including the
weekends, he came into the office at 9:30, sat on a sofa with
his typewriter on a kitchen chair, and cranked out 14 pages
in two hours. With a writer's typical obsession with word
count, Gruber tallies that to 1,500,000 words a year for
thirty years, an incredible output. He balanced that output
with the absolute biggest intake of liquor that Gruber had
ever seen. He came into the office with a quart thermos of
whiskey, and by noon it was gone. For lunch he had twelve to
fifteen drinks. After lunch he would run out to a local bar
every hour or so and suck down a few rum drinks, and after a
light dinner at home he got down to some serious drinking. In
spite of the intake, he held his liquor well, and never
passed out or got slobbering stupid. His writing for the
studios was of an unusual nature. He despised screenwriting
and wrote very few, his contribution being the stories that
could be adapted to the screen. In this fashion he created
the Dr. Kildare television series. Gruber describes Max Brand
as the King of the Pulps from 1926 through 1938. In 1944
Brand signed on as a war correspondent for Harper's Magazine.
He was killed on assignment a few days after arriving in
Italy.
In addition to the above, Gruber provides detailed
information on Black Mask, benefiting from both firsthand
experience and research done at University of California at
Los Angeles using their Black Mask collection. He tells about
his argument with Raymond Chandler, and about the murder of
Raoul Whitfield's rich wife. He ponders Hammett's writer's
block that lasted for 28 years. He tells of Nebel's desire to
graduate from Black Mask to the more elite women's magazines,
and the beginning of the paperback era before World War II.
And in the end, he reveals his secret eleven-ingredient
formula for writing a good mystery story. Within all this,
the conversational tone of the book relays a sense of Frank
Gruber. There is pride in his voice for the work he has
accomplished, but there is also an underlying bitterness
towards those who slighted him. And maybe to a certain extent
there is a melancholy recognition that with age the world has
passed him by. Although they are brief and few, there are
tangents towards the end that tend to moralize and
pontificate. For those with an interest in the pulps and
especially the writers and editors involved them, I can think
of no better accounting.
miker
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