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: “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.