Vintage Article: “A Love-Story Writer Learns To Kill”

As my self-publishing adventures have hit a lull, and as I’m too mentally burnt out to write a true review just yet, I thought I’d hit y’all with a vintage article, this time Doris Knight’s “A Love-Story Writer Learns To Kill” (from The Author & Journalist, December 1943).  Knight was primarily a romance writer, but she also dabbled in crime/detective fiction, as this article demonstrates.  (From the sound of it, a number of them were actually cross-over stories, that bridged both genres, and as such probably read as precursors to today’s romantic suspense category.)  Knight’s romances are rather hit-and-miss for me—there are some I’ve enjoyed (1934’s “Extra Sheer” I’d even label a low-key favorite), but then there are an equal amount I’ve been distinctly “meh” about.  Still, color me curious about her detective stories, and hopefully I can track a couple of them down at some point.

Knight had been writing for the pulps for close to two decades by 1943, but—as far as I can tell—this is the first trade article she penned.  (The first trade article she penned under her own name, at least—more on that in a moment.)  The personal issues I can have with her writing aside, there’s some decent advice to be found here (and not even detective-fiction-specific, I’d say).  Perhaps most notably is that it reveals two of her many pseudonyms: Knight Rhoades and Myra Gay.  (Other pseudonyms would be revealed in a later article.)  Going back to the topic of names, though it’s apparently the first trade article she wrote under her own, readers might remember my last vintage article, by one “Myrtle Clay,” wherein I speculated the author was actually Knight.  I’ll confess I’m still leaning that way, due to stylistic similarities, but feel free to read both and decide for yourself (and maybe even throw that “Sally Gordon” article in there, too, while you’re at it).

Vintage Article: “Cinderella On Horseback”

Back with another vintage fiction article!  This time about the Western romance pulps, and more specifically Western romance heroines, by Mabel Tracy Spitler and originally published in the August 1936 issue of The Author & Journalist.  The Western romance pulps are interesting in that they saw a lot of cross-over appeal, on both the readership level and the authorship level—while you do occasionally see male writers in the more general romance magazines of Love Story, All-Story Love, etc. (sometimes under female pseudonyms, sometimes not), the split was far more even in the Western romance titles.  I’m not yet super-familiar with them as a subgenre, but they do seem to be—on average—a bit more action-adventurey than their general romance counterparts.  The heroines, too, can seemingly afford to be a bit more morally ambiguous, occasionally sliding into anti-heroine territory (see Isabel Stewart Way’s “The Devil Rides a Black Horse,” in which the female lead is a literal cattle thief one of these days I will track down the second part of it).  Though, as you’ll see below (and as is still seen today, albeit in different ways), they still had to walk a very fine line as romance heroines.  (On that note, also see my last post and the discussion of who gets to be worthy of a happy ending.)

Nevertheless it’s a fun read, and a rare topic for the trade journals—romance articles in general are pretty hard to come by, but Western romance articles even moreso.  If nothing else, I feel it’s worth it for the adorable little cowgirl illustrations that decorate the pages, and which I’ve attached here in approximately the same places as in the original magazine.  (One of them appears to be signed “VH,” but I’ll admit I don’t know who the artist is beyond that.)  Regarding the magazine’s introduction of the author, I’ll also admit that I do not know what qualifies as “stormy love,” but maybe they mean the sort of romance that might end up in a confession magazine (again, see the end notes of my last post), and thus, by definition, didn’t require the now-ubiquitous Happily Ever After?

Vintage Article: “The Love-Pulp Heroine Steps Out”

It’s time for another vintage article, this time by fave pulp author Hortense McRaven, originally published in the August 1935 issue of The Author & Journalist.  (I do actually have a real review on the way, but then realized this could help lay some contextual groundwork for it, so here we are.)

As the sole non-fiction piece McRaven wrote (that I know of, at least), the article is one I find particularly interesting, partly because it gives some personal insight into McRaven, herself.  Sadly, my search for information about her seems to have hit a dead end; I’ve successfully dug up a decent amount of factual information, regarding where she lived, who she married, etc., etc., but precious little about what she was like as a person.  While she had one daughter, Hannah, I have not yet found any evidence to suggest that Hannah herself had any children, which leads me to believe she probably didn’t, which means no direct living descendants to chat to (Hannah seems to have died in 2002).  I did manage to track down Hortense’s grand-niece (her brother’s granddaughter), but unfortunately the relationship was too distant to be very useful—said grand-niece was not even aware her father’s “Aunt Horty” (as she was apparently called) had written for the pulps.  So I am, regrettably, left with little more than her writing to tell me about her personality.  And considering how difficult it has proven to track down her fiction, running across a non-fiction piece feels like hitting gold.

The other reason I find McRaven’s article interesting, however, is that it is perhaps the closest thing we have to true romance scholarship from the era, as it’s less about the craft of writing, and more about contemporary publishing/censorship trends and (potential) readership trends.  Laurie Powers actually briefly references the article in her book, Queen of the Pulps (sidebar: imagine my surprise when I came across that part in my reading!).  As seen below, McRaven theorized that maybe readers were becoming more educated and sophisticated, but Powers posits (p. 112) that “perhaps the intelligence of the reader had always been there and it was the editors and publishers that needed to catch up with them.”  It’s a fair point by Powers (romance readers have notoriously been underestimated and infantilized throughout history, after all; for a recent example, see the moral panic that Fifty Shades of Grey wrought), but I also think it’s worth mentioning that literacy rates were increasing at the time.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, general illiteracy rates in the U.S. dropped from 6.0% in 1920, to 4.3% in 1930, to 2.9% in 1940.  So as far as who is correct on the subject, Powers or McRaven, I suspect that the truth (as is so often the case) lies somewhere in the middle.

At any rate, I have preambled too long.  Enjoy!

Vintage Article: “Plotting Stories For the Love Pulps”

While I have a hot second of free time, here’s another vintage article!  Originally published in the June 1934 issue of The Author & Journalist, the following piece of plotting advice is attributed to one “Sally Gordon”—an admitted pseudonym.  The FictionMags Index (hardly the be-all and end-all of pulp information, but still a very good resource all the same) has no Sally Gordon on file, so the author’s true identity—for now—remains a mystery.  (For what it’s worth, there was a Violet Gordon who wrote prolifically for the romance pulps, and the years she spent active would certainly line up with this article, but to suggest that Sally Gordon and Violet Gordon are in fact one and the same is pure speculation, based on little more than an extremely common last name; at this moment, I am not familiar enough with Violet Gordon’s work to say whether the plots presented below and/or the writing style in general is similar enough to form the basis of a viable theory.)

Questions of authorial identity aside, the article holds the honor of being one of the very few pieces related to the romance pulps (perhaps the only piece?) that has since seen a reprinting of sorts—it was featured in No. 17 (2008’s issue) of The Pulpster, a yearly publication associated with PulpFest.  Currently a transcription can be found on thepulp.net, though that site takes some liberties with the formatting, inserting section breaks and sub-headings where there were originally none.

Vintage Article: “Love Stories Must Mirror Life, Says Daisy Bacon”

In hindsight, it was perhaps foolish of me to announce, just as I was headed into my busy period of the year (read: the summer), that I wanted to make at least one post a month, but here we are, oops.  😅 Anyway, while the reviews I want to write keep piling up, I’ve decided to supplement them with a new feature: vintage articles related to the pulps (because transcribing already-written words is a lot easier and less time-consuming than organizing my own thoughts about a piece of fiction, pfft).  As stated, most of these will be related to the romance genre, as that’s a sadly neglected area of pulp study, but that isn’t to say I won’t share other articles that catch my eye (for instance: one on “spicy” horror/mystery stories!).

The following, however, is an interview with Daisy Bacon, long-time editor of Love Story Magazine, conducted by B. Virginia Lee, originally published in the April 1934 issue of The Author & Journalist.  Laurie Powers, author of Queen of the Pulps, quotes this interview in her book, though I confess I can’t remember if she reproduced it in full (sadly, I don’t actually own a copy of said book, so I can’t easily check).  Curiously, despite Bacon’s progressive emphasis on working heroines (some of whom might even earn more than their male love interests!) and the question of whether a heroine would even want to get married in the first place, most stories featured in Love Story (and indeed, other competing romance pulps) lean toward the conservative side of things in my experience:  Marriage (or at least the promise of one) is a foregone conclusion, and if the heroine has any sort of job or career, more often than not she has given it up by the end.  (And if she hasn’t, then her job is all-but-guaranteed to be one in service to her fiancé/husband, such as being his secretary or assistant or what-have-you.)  I honestly have yet to come across a single pulp heroine who makes more than her love interest and stays making more than him by the end.  In that respect, romance fiction of the era perhaps shares a lot of similarities with romance fiction today, touting progressive ideals that the genre doesn’t always live up to.  Nevertheless, it’s an interesting article, and seems like the perfect way to kick off this new feature.  So without further ado: