--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Juri Nummelin"
<juri.nummelin@...> wrote:
>
> Wouldn't it be enough that writing these books
helped them just to keep
> alive? If there hadn't been a market for these,
Westlake and Block and
> certainly some others just might not have become the
authors they
are now.
And it's not so strange, since those books were popular
fiction, just like the hardboiled Gold Medals. Not strange
that Block, Westlake and others branched out into something
that they could write. Why would they not sell their pen to a
market? That would be like saying that a violinist should
only play classical music, and not do parties and such... A
worker has to look for work, in this case, for a place to
sell his work. What I see here is a microversion of the
obnoxious dichotomy between literature and popular fiction:
it's all literature.
By the way, much later than the early sixties Block published
a miniseries about a youngster who desperately wanted to get
laid... I forget the name of the protagonist, but the novels
were reprinted not that long ago.
The real productive pulpsters would sell to any magazine that
would pay: mystery, aviation, western, spicy, romance, etc.
That's what I call a savvy and productive attitude.
Best,
mrt
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