Vintage Article: “Putting Thrill Into Your Pulp Love Story”

Happy almost spring!  Back with another vintage article, this time from the November 1938 issue of The Author & Journalist.  While it’s written pseudonymously by “Myrtle Clay,” I have some suspicions that the author was actually Doris Knight, a prolific romance writer of the day (who, it should be noted, was known to use a whole slew of pen names—look her up on The FictionMags Index for the entire list, if you so desire).  Knight wrote some trade articles in the ’40s (that I’ll eventually get around to transcribing), and suffice it to say, the writing styles strike me as similar.  (Also, while I don’t directly recognize any of the story excerpts featured below, the problematic—to phrase it mildly—gender politics on display, along with the general writing advice, lines up with what I’ve seen in some of her work.)  With all this in mind, I’ve also started to entertain the idea that Knight wrote the previously-posted “Sally Gordon” article, because, again, the writing styles seem similar.

In any event, whoever “Myrtle Clay” really was, her writing advice isn’t all bad (indeed, the general concept of “putting thrill” into romance is a good one I just…uh…don’t always agree with her suggestions on how to accomplish that, pfft), and, as always, it provides a neat little look into how the love pulps were viewed at the time, and what kind of trends might have been popular/expected in them.

Romance Round-Up

As we come up on the end of February, and as I’ve added a great number of stories to my Pulp Romance Guide this month (many of which didn’t warrant a full, dedicated review), I thought I’d do a little round-up of some of my favorites (with a couple slightly older ones thrown in for good measure).  Story links found through the titles this time around, and FYI, they’re listed chronologically, not in order of how much I personally enjoyed them or whatever.

Not an issue I own, but a favorite Valentine cover all the same.  Love Book Magazine, March 1950.  Artist unknown.

Author Spotlight: Gertrude “Toki” Schalk

A day late for Valentine’s Day, but nonetheless, in honor of both Valentine’s Day and Black History Month, I’m doing something a little different and giving you a post not about a particular story (though I cover some of those as well) so much as a post about a particular author.  I’ve been thinking of adding an “author spotlight” feature to the blog for a while now (highlighting various forgotten pulp romance authors, natch), and this seems like the perfect way to kick it off.  So yes, today I’m talking about Gertrude Schalk (better known as Toki Schalk Johnson), an African-American author who wrote prolifically for both newspapers and the pulps.  While there were likely other women of color (potentially even men of color) writing for the romance pulps back in the day, Schalk is one of the only ones currently known to us.  I can only hope to uncover more in the future, but this is what I’ve got for now, so let’s dive in:

“Undress Parade”: Oh, honey, you were so close to getting it.

Undress Parade.  Carisimo, who owned the Club Caress and offered a floor show to his patrons nightly, called that last act “Living Picture Play,” but the girls who took part in it called it by the other name.

Undress Parade.  Beauty, unveiled for sale or for lure, that any one who paid the ridiculously high cover charge could stare at and smirk about.  The loveliest girls on Broadway, and the barest, so rumor said.

Today we have Dorothy Dow’s short story/novelette “Undress Parade,” published in the January 1st, 1938 issue of Love Story Magazine (formally digitized and available on the Internet Archive).  Dow was an extremely prolific author, writing both poetry and fiction (and other things), and she got back on my mind because of Reasons, at which point I realized I didn’t think I’d ever read anything by her—this, despite seeing her name in numerous pulp magazines.  I turned out to be wrong, however; I in fact had read “Undress Parade” once upon a time, late at night, but had forgotten about it because the whole outing—despite some rare nudity—had landed on the unpleasant side of “meh.”  (Trigger warning for sexual assault, I guess, though I don’t go into it in detail.)

“The Clergyman and the Actress”: Priest kinks, priest kinks, come get your priest kinks!

For two months she had occupied a seat in the first pew every Sunday and each Sabbath her presence had been more disconcerting to the young clergyman.  Yet she never did anything to distract his attention from sermon and prayers, that is consciously.  She sat there, gloved hands in her lap, violet shadowed eyes staring straight ahead, coral lips parted, her attitude one of reverence.

Happy 2024!  New years are always difficult for me to settle into, so despite my elation at having finally procured copies of Jean Ferris’ 1996 YA historical romance trilogy (post now updated with cover images), I’ve decided to get my reviewing feet wet with Beulah Poynter’s short story, “The Clergyman and the Actress,” published in the December 12th, 1933 issue of Sweetheart Stories (PDF of the tale available here).  Poynter is one of those authors who’s casually been on my radar for a while—I first discovered her in the March 27th, 1937 issue of All-Story Love Stories with “The Rivals,” and despite my initial skepticism (“is this guy honestly jealous of a dog?”), the story turned out to be a lot better than I expected, with some pleasantly healthy relationship dynamics.  So when I ran across a couple other promising pieces by her during my October BGSU visit, I decided to snap them up.  “The Clergyman and the Actress” was one of them, mostly because it seemed so fucking bizarre.  At a mere three pages, it’s a decidedly short short story, and—as previously stated—it reads like some kind of proto-Hot Priest erotica, only without the Forbidden Fruit aspect of Catholicism, and also without anything actually erotic.  Hella strange vibes, but hella interesting vibes all the same.

Vintage Article: “Promising Writer Is Discovered Nearby”

As we finish up 2023, I’m coming at you with one more vintage article, this time a newspaper interview with Mary Frances Morgan, published in The Hammond Vindicator—of Hammond, Louisiana—on December 4th, 1936.  As you might recall, I previously wondered if “Mary Frances Morgan” might have been a pseudonym for Clyde Robert Bulla, due to one of Morgan’s stories, “No Road Back,” being credited to Bulla for one part on The FictionMags Index.  A serendipitous eBay listing confirmed that this was not a mistake on the Index’s part (see the table of contents for the issue and the first page of the story proper), and an online acquaintance with a newspapers.com subscription gifted me the article below, proving that they were in fact two separate people.  Which was helpful and fascinating, but still left me wondering what the story was with “No Road Back.”  Was it a weird collaboration?  Had the magazine itself screwed up and credited the wrong person for one issue?

Well, a thorough read of the article (as opposed to the skim I initially gave it) seems to have revealed the answer:  Though Bulla isn’t mentioned by name, Morgan is stated to have been collaborating on a serial with another writer.  And considering the timing of the Vindicator article (published December 4th) and the timing of “No Road Back” (published November 21st, November 28th, December 5th, and December 12th of the same year), it seems reasonable to assume that that is indeed the story being referenced.

Perhaps more exciting than that, however, is the reveal that Morgan was a cover artist, for sure painting the cover of the August 8th, 1936 issue of All-Story Love Stories (coincidentally advertising her own story in the process, hah).  The article goes on to say she painted “many” of the magazine’s cover designs, and—judging by the art style—I would hazard to say that she was in fact the main cover artist for All-Story Love during the mid- to late-’30s.  Further research indicates that she went on to have quite the career in journalism, not only writing for local print publications, but eventually working in both radio and television.  (Still curious about how that collaboration with Bulla happened, though!)

Anyway, please note that the article’s author consistently misspells Amita Fairgrieve’s last name as “Fairgreve.”  This and other technical errors have been marked in-text.  Without further ado, enjoy!

“Vampire’s Honeymoon”: His name was Dick Man.

I met her last night.  She’s beside me now, asleep, because I’m afraid to let her out of my sight; afraid I’ll lose her again, as mysteriously as I found her, if I don’t keep her with me every moment of the time.

WELL.  I finally got around to reading “Vampire’s Honeymoon,” and I’m kind of kicking myself for not doing it sooner?  Because, man, WHAT A RIDE.  Written by Cornell Woolrich and originally published in the August/September 1939 issue of Horror Stories, it was finally collected in the 1985 Carroll & Graf anthology Vampire’s Honeymoon (notable for having a cover that—while not technically misrepresentative of the story—is still hella misleading).  Is “Vampire’s Honeymoon” good?  No.  But I’m inclined to call it a weird, campy sort of masterpiece all the same.  Essentially, it’s Alternate Universe Dracula fanfiction (it’s even written in epistolary fashion, a la Bram Stoker’s tale), where Dracula is a lady and Mina gets to be the vampire slayer at the end.  I don’t think Woolrich intended it to be a comedy (contrary to popular belief, he could in fact be quite funny when he wanted to be, and it usually comes off as far more deliberate than it does here), but there’s nevertheless something bizarrely hilarious about the story all the same.  And because it isn’t readily available online (and because the plot is honestly pretty simple), let’s dive in with a play-by-play summary:

Vintage Article: “The Love Pulps”

I’ve been on a vintage article kick lately (for Reasons), so today I’m coming at you with one more, this time Thomas H. Uzzell’s extensive essay, “The Love Pulps,” as published in the April 1938 issue of Scribner’s.  It’s the second part in what appears to have been a four-part series (each written by a different author) on “magazines that sell,” and you can find it in isolation on archive.org, or else The Pulp Magazines Project has also shared it (albeit in image form, not formally transcribed as it is here).

It’s a frustratingly offensive (read: sexist) article at times, but there’s still no denying that there’s a lot of good information couched in between Uzzell’s general misogyny and gender essentialism (though his unsourced claim that women made up less than 10% of pulp readers at the time seems incredibly suspect—my gut says it was probably quite a bit higher, as women have traditionally read, and even enjoyed, a number of things that were supposedly “for men”).  Laurie Powers references the article a couple times in Queen of the Pulps (incorrectly stating the author’s first name to be “Robert” instead of “Thomas”), noting (p. 131) that it is possibly responsible for the oft-quoted estimate that romance pulp powerhouse and genre trailblazer Love Story was moving somewhere around 600,000 copies per issue at the peak of its circulation, making it the best-selling pulp magazine of all time.  (And to put that number in perspective, it’s estimated that Black Mask, the king of the crime/detective pulps, was moving somewhere around 150,000 copies per issue at its peak.  Furthermore, Love Story was a weekly, while Black Mask was—for the majority of its run—a monthly.  So the differences here, between the top romance pulp and the top crime/detective pulp, are really quite astronomical.)  Beyond that, I suspect the article is also responsible for, if not the legend of Love Story’s origin in and of itself, then at least the legend’s enduring legacy—of how initial editor Amita Fairgrieve supposedly holed herself up inside a Street & Smith office for six months (a more-believable six weeks according to some versions), with a stack of dime novels and next to no human contact, before finally emerging at the end of the period with the idea for the magazine fully formed, like Athena springing out of Zeus’ skull.

In any event, go in with your defenses raised and with a few grains of salt at the ready, but do try to enjoy it all the same.

Vintage Article: “The New Pulp Love Story”

Well, October came and went, and then the beginning of November, and now we’re at the end of November, still with no spooky review in sight, oops.  (In hindsight, I really should stop making promises or even voicing plans out loud, because that inevitably seems to doom them. 😅)  Instead I have another vintage article on romance pulps, this time by Clyde Robert Bulla, published in the April 1938 issue of The Author & Journalist.

Bulla was/is mostly known as a children’s book author (he appears to have moved into the field sometime in the mid- to late-’40s), but as you can see, during his very early career, he was writing for the pulps.  A little less than three dozen stories by him are currently listed on The FictionMags Index, though, curiously, one of them (1936’s serial “No Road Back”) is credited to Mary Frances Morgan for three of its four parts.  It’s possible this is an error in the Index, but it’s also possible that “Mary Frances Morgan” was a pseudonym he used, and the magazine itself screwed up the names.  (The pulps were, after all, cheaply produced and kind of janky, and it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing happened.  I’ve personally run across a few instances of a story being credited to an author’s real name in the table of contents, and then a pen-name in the magazine proper, or vice versa.)  Without actually seeing the issue(s) in question, it’s hard to say for sure, but the active years of both authors—along with the magazines they wrote for—certainly line up.  It would be interesting to do some cross-referencing, to see if any of the plots Bulla describes below show up in stories by Morgan.  Until some harder evidence like that comes to light, the idea that the two are in fact one and the same is all just speculation.  (EDIT:  They were in fact separate people and “No Road Back” was a collaboration between them.)

Anyway, what I find neat about Bulla’s article (despite how he rather hilariously references his own work quite a lot—I gotta admire the hustle, to be honest), is that it seems to provide more evidence to my theory (previously discussed in this post) that the romance genre as a whole saw a seismic shift sometime in the early-’30s—a shift that was primarily reflected in the pulps, because I’m going to posit that the pulps were actually the main way readers consumed romance at the time.  I’ve said it before, but I see a lot of parallels between the pulp romance boom of the 1930s and the so-called “Romance Wars” of the 1980s; the romance pulps very much strike me as the forgotten ancestor of the modern category romance.

Well, before we get into it, fair warning that Bulla uses the slur “gypsy” in reference to a character’s wanderlusty lifestyle, along with the questionable phrase “sloe-eyed” in reference to villainesses.  (The latter isn’t explicitly synonymous with Asian people, but as Yellow Peril was running rampant at the time, I…remain cautious about his use of it here.)  Beyond that, I’d love to know (and find) the 1932 love pulp outline he mentions at the beginning.

Vintage Article: “Have You a Little Sadism In Your Dome?”

In honor of Spooky Season and Halloween’s impending arrival, I’m mixing things up and bringing you—not a vintage article on romance pulps this time around—but one on horror pulps!  Published in the November 1939 issue of The Author & Journalist and written by Harry Adler (who served as the magazine’s associate editor), it gives genuinely good information and advice for those looking to break into the horror market (which is genuinely insightful, for those pulp enthusiasts/historians who might be looking back), but the author is also genuinely aware of just how ridiculous most of these stories were/are.  As such, the article has a light, satirical tone, as Adler seems to good-humoredly call out just about everything—from the creaky plot mechanics, to the egregious female nudity, right down to the very titles themselves.  Perhaps my favorite part is when he comments upon the villains’ electric bills, adding that these characters must make their local utility companies very happy.

As someone who has reviewed a few pulp horror pieces from the era (sometimes also referred to as “shudder pulps” or “weird menace” tales), and who has read even more, I do feel somewhat qualified to say that Adler’s observations/criticisms—compressed as his research appears to have been—ring true.  There are, of course, some authors out there who managed to do more within the confines of the genre (see: the Cornell Woolrich reviews within the above linked tag), but they were very much the exception, not the rule.  Still, even those stories that are nothing more than dumb exploitation thrillers can still be fun in their own ways.  (After all, I myself retain a weird soft spot for Robert Leslie Bellem’s “Death’s Nocturne,” because sometimes I like eating trash, and that’s okay mostly because I can acknowledge when something is trash and I also don’t go making that sort of thing my entire media diet.)

Anyway, enjoy! 🎃