This post is brought to you by The Wild Inc. series by Jack Mackenzie. Beginning with The Shattered Men, then The Deadly Mister Punch, and finally, the third volume, Madame Murder. The adventures of Morrigan Wild and her team of skilled assistants will thrill fans of the old Doc Savage paperbacks and Pulps. Set in modern times, the series still has that Pulp feel that hero Pulps of old possessed. Jack is hard at work on an upcoming fourth novel.
April 8, 1949 is a sad day in Pulp history. It was on this day that Street & Smith, probably the biggest and best publisher of Pulps, declared that they would no longer publish Pulps. It was a death-knell that was heard across the publishing industry. Effectively, magazines like Doc Savage disappeared in this moment. Other companies soldiered on for another five or more years, like Weird Tales that suffered through its final spasms, but the writing was on the wall. Seventy-six years ago, the great dying off began and the music to the Pulp fan’s ears died.
Let’s look at some of the final issues of Street & Smith Pulps from that decision…but first, this!
Astounding Science Fiction, October 1943
Now the sharp-eyed will be asking, hey that’s 1943! This was the last issue that appeared in Pulp format. Astounding became a digest with the next issue and survived to this day as Analog. (I’m not quite dead yet! Well, he was coughing up blood last night.) Some Pulps would survive by changing format. Others were simply gone. Digest format had become a new possibility with magazines like Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction proving that all that wonderful Pulp art wasn’t necessary to sell. These two never had a Pulp version.
Again the sharp-eyed will notice that these last issues weren’t dated April or even May. The publishing machine ground to a halt in August of 1949, with its last couple of issues to appear before the gasping to a halt.
Detective Story, Summer 1949
“Accounting for Murder” by Michael A. Thomas, “The Deaths of Laurie Ford” by G. T. Fleming-Roberts and “The Dead Walk” by William P. McGivern are the most famous writers in this mag. Pretty lackluster. I’m finding it hard to cry over this one.
Doc Savage, Summer 1949
The final Lester Dent novel before the whole series was resurrected in paperback format in 1964. “Up From Earth’s Center” is a good one too, with plenty of SF elements. Doc started out great but World War II had dimmed his flame. This novel feels like Dent was finding a new fire when the series got snuffed out.
The Shadow, Summer 1949
“The Whispering Eyes” was the Shadow’s final outing. Written by Walter B. Gibson, one has to wonder if it would have been followed by The Shouting Ears or The Stuttering Nose. The Shadow was the first and probably the most famous of the hero magazines. The successful Shadow Comics also ended August 1949. S&S must have seen comic books as a marketing tool for Pulps. Neither were required any longer.
Western Story, August-September 1949
“Powdersmoke Percentage” by L. L. Foreman, “Bullet Bounty” by T. T. Flynn, “Saddle Test” by Walt Coburn and “Blind Trap” by Jim Kjelgaard are some of the stories included in this issue. Western Story, like a few others, got a reprieve later, being sold off to another company. It no longer bore the Street & Smith logo in the W. Undoubtedly the primo Western magazine to appear in. Only selling a Western to the Slicks like The Saturday Evening Post was better. Writers like Luke Short certainly did this. Hollywood took some. Others, like Jim Kjelgaard, pursued children’s books like the Big Red series. Other Pulpsters went to the Men’s magazines with pros like Paul Ernst and Hugh B. Cave transitioned into the women’s mags. Others, like Victor Rousseau, hung up their spurs and disappeared.
Conclusion
I think I am suggesting that some of the Pulps didn’t really die in 1949 because of the rise of paperbacks and digest magazines. While that might be true in the case of Astounding, it isn’t really true in one important way. This change in format (which really isn’t that important) came with a change in direction or philosophy. Magazine publishers realized a woman’s magazine like Mademoiselle or Good Housekeeping could make big profits from advertising while fiction mags were failing partly due to Radio and later television, paperbacks and comic books. Readers had so many more options as media grew. For SF fans, this was now the era of Galaxy, F&SF, the digest sized Astounding (not yet Analog). The old Pulp aims of entertaining first were replaced with a growing fascination with cleverness. Whether that was literary cleverness in the New Wave or the slick urbanity of Horace L. Gold or Anthony Boucher. If you wanted Pulp, you had to find the Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks that exploded in the 1960s. Or those Bantam Doc Savage paperbacks that we hoarded. Imagine that! All that Pulpy stuff was new again! (The only bigger DUH! I experienced in my life time was in 1977 when the world discovered all that old Buck Rogers stuff could make billions!)
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