Confessions of a pulpeteer – Jack Smalley article about his days as a pulp author and editor – part 1

Whiz Bang was the Playboy of its day, but now its sins seem comically insipid. It was printed on sixty-four pages of pulp paper—the term comes from wood macerated to a soupy pulp in sulphuric acid—and it consisted of euphemistic jokes and cartoons and doggerel verse celebrating unrequited love.

After collecting jokes, limericks and cartoons, Billy had gone around to his friends, offering to sell a half interest in his magazine for $500, the amount needed to print 10, 000 copies.

There were no takers.

Finally, a small print shop agreed to produce 5, 000 copies on credit. Billy peddled these to cigar stands and hotels in Minneapolis and St. Paul, to be sold on consignment for twenty-five cents per copy; Billy would collect fifteen cents on each copy sold. Before he got back home, some stands were on the phone asking for a reorder. The forms were put back on the press again and again, and still the dealers clamored for copies.

On a monthly sale of 450, 000 copies, Billy cleared nearly a dime apiece, for an income of $45, 000. He put together his own distributing company, further increasing his profits; and he demanded a cash advance before he would ship copies to a dealer. Billy was a smart poker player, and he now began shoving some of his winnings back into new magazines.

Contributors to Whiz Bang included a high percentage of con men who sent in their jokes and jingles from dozens of jailhouses. They cashed the three dollars paid for each accepted joke and came to regard Billy as both friend and benefactor. They wrote long letters of their lurid wrongdoings to prove that they were really innocent victims of society, and Billy got the idea of publishing their stories. He thought of the perfect title: True Confessions.

True Confessions magazine published by Fawcett Publications, Robbinsdale, Minnesota Image courtesy the Robbinsdale Historical Society

Its pages were crawling with the confessions of convicts, murderers, train robbers and jaded ladies, stitched together with tearful tales of unwed mothers and the serial life story of seductive Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, whose husband shot her lover.

I was put to work on the third of the string, named Triple-X, which was to contain three types of stories —Western, detective and adventure.

Handed a stack of manuscripts by the editor, John Jensen, I was told to read them carefully and write a synopsis and brief critique of each one. I was struggling along on my first story when Jensen came by. “Don’t read every word,” he said, smiling. “Just run your eye down the middle of the page. Do it fast. Don’t look at the edges; a few words down the middle tell you all you need to know.”

The method proved astonishingly effective. This was no way to read Plato, but it served with pulp fiction, and it was easier than covering the police beat for the Minneapolis Star.

The pulps were beginning to flower in all hues and colors. The largest of the pulp magazine publishing houses was Street & Smith, which produced the highly successful weekly Western Story Magazine among their other titles. We all envied them their top writer, Max Brand. His name on the cover helped sell a half million copies a week. Triple-X tried to buy some Max Brands, without success.

Brand’s real name was Frederick Faust; he was a big, powerful, good- looking man with astounding energy and talent, who began a pulp writing career in 1917. It ended thirty million words later when, as a war correspondent for Harper’s Magazine, he was killed by shrapnel on the night of May 11, 1944, in Italy.

At last the writer felt the sting of death in battle that he had described so many times. In Destry, the story of the vengeance of a man railroaded to prison, is a passage typical of Max Brand: “The white face was lighted, the nostrils flared; the eyes of Destry gleamed with fire….” Then one of the villains drew his gun. “He was dead in the middle of a curse, for out of the flap of his coat Destry had drawn a revolver, long barreled, gleaming blue; a fire spat from its mouth.”

Just like the movie moguls had their stable of stars, the pulp publishers relied on at least one big name and a few additional regulars to attract readers.

Triple-X pulp magazine published by Fawcett Publications, December 1926 issue

Triple-X regarded H. Bedford- Jones as its drawing card. He too is credited with over 100 books, and hundreds of short stories and novelets.

Both Faust and Bedford-Jones were paid an average of five cents per word and each wrote under many pen names; but the latter wrote at least a third of his books in French, and his works included many historical “costume” novels which did not match the Western romances in popularity. He died in 1949 and, except among those who were pulp-adventure fans, his name is seldom mentioned today.

True to style, he never bothered to correct or rewrite a story, for a pulpeteer could not afford to waste time polishing a manuscript. What came out of the typewriter was what was published.

Henry lived in Ann Arbor in a huge Tudor-style English home, writing in a tower reached by circular stairs. Four electric typewriters stood about the room—in one might be a Western for Triple-X, in another a serial in French destined for his publisher in Paris, the third empty and a detective story in the fourth. Henry would leave one typewriter for another whenever he was bogged down. If he got up fairly early in the morning he could turn out a complete Western novelet of 25, 000 words by breakfast the next day.

Though he did not revise his manuscripts, they needed no editing when they reached me. He authored a book, This Fiction Business, in 1929, and sent me a copy inscribed “to Jack Smalley, who will agree with all the hard words said about editors by H. Bedford-Jones.” In it he wrote, “When you are learning to write, you want to learn to write—time enough later to learn revision and polishing. To advise a young writer to ‘ceaselessly polish, revise, polish again’ is venerable and absolute bosh. Anatole France laid down half a dozen rules; I kept them by me a year or two, but the manuscripts on which I used them did not sell very readily, and I discarded his advice. What the young writer needs is little re-writing and a very great deal of writing.”

Once Bedford-Jones wanted to write an entire issue of Triple-X: the novelet, first installment of a serial, two shorter novelets and a half dozen short stories. He wanted to show that it could be done. I turned down the proposal because of the technical problem of manuscript inventories and commitments to other writers.

In the detective pulp field, Dell featured Erle Stanley Gardner, a latecomer forced into fiction by the Depression. I had met Erle in Minneapolis, when he sold me a couple of detective yarns set in Chinatown. He hailed from Ventura, where he was an attorney; and he explained that there were Chinatowns in the area, and he happened to have represented an Oriental in a criminal case, which made his reputation with them.

Erle’s client had been picked up in Chinatown on a charge of conducting a gambling place, and had been thrown into jail. Erle got him out on bail and had him plead not guilty. When the trial came Erle arrived with the defendant and six other Chinese. At the critical moment he demanded that the prosecuting attorney’s chief witness pick out the defendant from among the seven Chinese present. He picked three wrong men in succession and was laughed off the stand.

“They tested my honesty a few times after that, but I satisfied them and I got all their business,” said Erle. “Things are awful slow now, so I decided to write about some of my experiences, mostly around Chinatown.”

A paragraph in “Fingers of Fong” shows how closely Erle drew on fact, when he wrote that his detective, Dick Sprague, “suspected that certain pit- falls which developed had been shrewdly designed to test his honesty. Then had come the proposition out of a clear sky. He would give up his little private detective agency and work exclusively for the On Leong Tong.”

A year later he wrote a novelet, “The Case of the Velvet Claws,” introducing a new hero named Perry Mason.

To be continued next week…