The pulp magazines had their heyday during the time period
between the two World Wars. After World War II, paperbacks
slowly squeezed the pulps out as the preferred media for
cheap fiction. Subtitled The Sensational Age of the American
Paperback: 1945-1955, Lee Server's Over My Dead Body presents
a wonderful visual tour of the glory years of the paperback
revolution. Color copies of many of the lurid covers dominate
the book, and Server's brief text provides suitable
background for the bold and bawdy show. The book conveys the
tension and the contradictions of the era. The deadliest war
in history had been fought, and two terrible enemies had been
vanquished. Win or lose, right or long, violence had not lost
its allure and, coupled with sex, it was an intoxicating
theme.
Server marks the 1938 paperback printing of Pearl Buck's The
Good Earth as the beginning of the paperback era. From there,
fueled by a demand for cheap entertainment for American
troops, paperback growth was astronomical. When World War II
ended, demand for paperbacks lessened somewhat, triggering a
marketing struggle that featured ever-increasing promises of
sex and violence as its main selling point. They indulged the
seven deadly sins, and came up with a few more. Server
writes, "Whole genres would develop around such shocking
subject matter as drug addiction, racism, homosexuality, and
juvenile delinquency." Free from the tight media regulations
that dominated radio, television, and cinema, paperback
sensationalism peaked out around 1951 when publicity made
them the focus of several government investigations.
Of the hundreds of authors published in paperback during this
period, Mickey Spillane was the most popular. As today, when
paperbacks first became popular it was traditional for the
first edition to be hardback with later editions in softback.
Spillane's I, The Jury followed this pattern. It sold poorly
in hardback, but unprecedented millions sold in paperback,
firmly establishing the paperback media and affirming the
significance of its market niche. Soon after I, The Jury hit
the streets, Fawcett publishers broke from the tradition of
first print hardcovers with their Gold Medal line of
paperback originals. The snob appeal remained with a
hardcover first edition, but Gold Medal paid as much as two
or three thousand dollars advances to the authors, and this
is where the money was. Marijane Meaker notes in her
autobiography of Patricia Highsmith that Highsmith liked the
highbrow appeal of coming out in hardback but resented making
far less money than Meaker who, writing as Vin Packer, was
raking in the cash through Gold Medal.
The Gold Medal label, more than any other, has come to
represent the era. The cover art was superb, and the list of
authors is a who's who of hot ticket writers, including J.D.
MacDonald, W.R. Burnett, David Goodis, Charles Williams, Day
Keene, Louis L'Amour, and Gil Brewer. Server points out that
Gold Medal picked up many authors from the dying pulps, such
as Cornell Woolrich, Bruno Fischer, and Harry Whittington.
The popular and outrageous Shell Scott detective series by
Hugh Prather were Gold Medal. Psychology doctorate Peter Rabe
wrote seventeen. Several of Chester Himes's Gravedigger Jones
and Coffin Ed Harlem detective novels came out as Gold
Medals. Server notes the label covered a wide variety of
topics, ranging "from Westerns to horror to exotic adventure,
as well as such exotic 1950s fiction genres as lesbianism and
juvenile delinquency." The first 78 titles sold a stunning 29
million books.
Sex was king in the paperbacks, even trumping violence.
Server notes that beyond it being an important undercurrent,
some of the sleazier publishers, such as Venus Books, Quarter
Books, Cameo, and Esctasy Novels dealt exclusively in overt
eroticism. No less than the great Charles Willeford played to
this tune in Pick-Up, Server quoting the blurb, "He holed up
with a helpless lush. A story that builds to a shattering
climax." With Willeford as a notable exception, the
over-the-top sex themes did not age well, and most of the
authors reside in well-deserved obscurity. Jack Woodford
wrote a few. Family man Orrie Hitt wrote over a hundred,
cranking out a novel every two weeks. Lesbian sex fared at
least as well as heterosexual. Vin Packer's Spring Fire about
lesbian college girls broke the two-decade sales record
established by Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road. In this case,
it wasn't all sensationalism. Packer was a solid writer whose
talent at portraying life's losers ranked her along with
David Goodis.
Many of the novels of the period could be loosely grouped
into subgenres, many of them inspired by books from years
earlier. Erskine Caldwell's famous Tobacco Road spawned a
bawdy backwoods genre visited by John Faulkner, Charles
Williams, and Gil Brewer. Bildungsromans by J.T. Farrell, the
Studs Lonigan trilogy, and Wilmer's Knock on any Door
provided inspiration for a juvenile delinquent genre. Irving
Shulman's famous Amboy Dukes served as a cornerstone for Hal
Ellson's Duke, Evan Hunter's Blackboard Jungle, and over two
hundred other tough kid novels. A Shulman screen play
immortalized James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Server
ropes in the Beat authors also, although with the exception
of William Burroughs's Junkie and a few others, such as
Kerouac's Tristessa, their intellectual meanderings seem
strangely out of place.
The cover art evolved through this period. During World War
II, the paperback covers followed
"commercial art techniques of abstraction and symbolism" that
closely paralleled hardcover art. It was after the war when
the style shifted to gaudy oil covers reflecting an
emotionally charged realism. Motifs included tough angry men,
beautiful fearful women, liberal cleavage, alleyways, unmade
beds, smoking cigarettes and smoking guns. Many of the cover
artists had a long resume of pulp magazine experience.
Rudolph Belarski is credited with hundreds of Popular Library
covers, while James Avati's work adorned Signet novels. It
was the erotic and violent laden covers that attracted
government investigation in the early 1950s. Although the
Gathings Committee imposed no fines and initiated no new
regulations, the publishing business took heed, and the end
of the decade saw toned down cover themes and a gradual shift
away from the style that was an icon for the era.
Server wraps up the book with a brief discussion of paperback
collecting and then a respectful eulogy for the many
paperback writers who wrote so much and got so little. For
every J.D. MacDonald success story there were a hundred
struggling in a tough world during the day and fighting inner
demons alone at night. Some, like David Goodis, lived
dangerously close to the nightmare world they wrote about.
Others, like Cornell Woolrich, lived lives of quiet
desperation. Many, like Jim Thompson, succumbed to the
writer's disease and drank themselves into an early grave.
Geoffrey O'Brien, in his Hardboiled America, saw these racy
paperbacks and their risque covers as an anachronism,
disconnected with the present and frozen in the past, but Lee
Server disagrees with this assessment, declaring that they
have "lost none of their power."
miker
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