Let’s Talk About Pulp –
I’d be willing to bet that anyone finding this blog, or my website in general, is probably the type of person who heads to the bookshelves first when they step into a general store, mall, or even an antique shop. And that type of person, like me, probably gets a special thrill of anticipation from seeing the gritty, bold, and often stylized covers of western stories. There’s no doubt whatsoever that the aesthetics of modern westerns owe their flashy boldness to the lurid, earthy covers of pulp fiction novels.
Pulp fiction is often said to have been born with the December 1896 issue of The Argosy, a publication that had begun as a boy’s adventure magazine before going through several evolutions. In attempts to redefine itself, the magazine first moved away from a strictly youthful audience and next dropped the informative articles from its pages, printing solely fictional stories (Ashley). Western fiction, however, was already entertaining and thrilling people before then. Pulp Magazines didn’t invent the western, but they quickly inherited it.
Following the Civil War, dime novels began to make their way into American households, introducing readers to a highly mythologized wild west landscape. Pulp magazines adopted the same date of cheap, sensational literature, and made it even cheaper, even bolder, and even more widely available. The pulp market might not have invented westerns, but it certainly did help to bolster the genre. Publications like Western Story Magazine spat out weekly cowboy tales, familiarizing audiences with tropes that we still recognize: the lone gunslinger, the shoot-out at high-noon, the corrupt lawman, the lurid lady with her heart of gold…
One of my first published short stories appeared in a collection entitled the “Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes” edited by Mike Chinn. It was a wonderful collection to be a part of, full of adventure stories, tall tales, and of course heroes and villains that paid homage to the “good old days” of pulp fiction. Sharing space with the authors in that collection opened my eyes to the idea that plenty of modern readers were still invested in the fiction I was having the most fun writing.
For me now, the satisfaction is in taking those old tropes and turning them sideways. I still love the grit, the danger, and the moral questions at the heart of a traditional western, but I aim to bring the genre into a new era. That means keeping what works – the dusty settlements, the showdowns, the tough choices, the romantic, wide open landscapes – while finding ways to skew the clichés into new perspectives and viewpoints that pulp fiction never gave space to before. I want to write westerns that feel just as thrilling as the ones in those pulp magazines, but ring with a little more honest humanity between the covers.
References:
Ashley, M. “The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction.” The Pulp Magazines Project. May 2005. Retrieved from https://www.pulpmags.org/contexts/essays/golden-age-of-pulps.html
Chinn, M. Alchemy Press Book of Pulp Heroes. Alchemy Press. Edited by Mike Chinn. August 26, 2012. https://alchemypress.wordpress.com/alchemy-publications/alchemy-anthologies/pulp-heroes/