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.)

Vintage Article: “Mrs. Grundy In Fiction Land”

Today’s vintage article, “Mrs. Grundy In Fiction Land,” is from the January 1942 issue of The Author & Journalist.  Written by Sewell Peaslee Wright, it mostly focuses on cultural trends, particularly as they relate to censorship trends.  It isn’t specifically about romance, but Wright certainly touches on some romance tropes, or else topics that specifically pertain to romance.  The talk about authors holding off on kisses or clinches for narrative/romantic tension certainly makes some sense, however I’m not sure I agree with his stated differences between the rules for pulps vs. the rules for slicks—there obviously were differences between the two, but I can tell you that plenty of pulp heroines have to worry about spending a night in a man’s company unchaperoned, and I’ve seen more than a few slick heroines who still “suffer unduly” for actions (usually pertaining to sex) deemed morally wrong.  (Regarding the former, it could be that the heroines of Westerns, specifically—pulps or otherwise—are afforded special treatment, due to living that “wild,” “frontier” life, that necessitates a loosening of social norms in service of, yanno, survival.)

Anyway, Wright himself is probably best remembered these days as a sci-fi author (of stories such as 1932’s “Vampires of Space,” which disappointingly—I would even go so far as to say heinously—appears to feature no vampires whatsoever).  There’s a whiff of sexism/misogyny at work here, but Wright is thankfully not nearly as bad as Thomas H. Uzzell, and in general I find the article interesting and insightful—hence my wanting to share it in the first place.  So enjoy!

“The Door Between”: Come for (what you think is going to be) the fake relationship trope, stay for the disability rep.

“It shouldn’t be hard to be a good wife,” Anne said, smiling, “if you love your husband.”

“Oh, I love him all right or I wouldn’t have smashed my career for him.  I threw over five hundred a week for him knowing that old G-G, Hart’s father, was going to cut him out of his will.  But naturally,” her mouth twisted, trembled, “I didn’t expect the kind of break I got.  Hart’s clever and sweet, and he could have gone places if the accident hadn’t happened.  But now—”  She paused, took a cigarette from a platinum case and lighted it.  “Do you know what being a good wife means?”

Anne shook her head.  She was thinking about a boy twenty-four years old, unquestionably attractive if he had looked like the newspaper pictures she had seen, confined to his bed or a wheel chair for the rest of his life.

The new year’s malaise still lingers, but since posting about “The Clergyman and the Actress,” I’ve been on something of a Beulah Poynter binge.  In addition to purchasing five of her novels, I discovered that the Villanova Digital Library has seemingly every public domain issue of Mystery Magazine, which coincidentally includes some of her earliest pieces of fiction (some of which—despite the name—don’t actually qualify as mysteries, like not even a little, but are nevertheless incredibly interesting in their own way).  So she’s been on my mind.  And, perhaps inevitably, I found my thoughts wandering back to “The Door Between,” from the May 1942 issue of Sweetheart Stories (PDF of the story available here).  Previously I said the story was part of my BGSU haul, but it turns out I was wrong—I actually own the issue (purchased shortly before my BGSU visit), so I think what happened is that “The Clergyman and the Actress” inspired me to take a closer look at it, at which point I took photographs of it, but those photos happened to be right next to all the others in my camera roll, hence the confusion.  (So I guess I only picked up the one Beulah Poynter story from my library visit?  Must be.)  Anyway, “The Door Between” sticks in my head not only because it features a disabled hero, but because—despite the mad plot—it’s also quite genuinely sexy and fairly sophisticated on the emotional side of things.  And again, “emotional sophistication” is not something you typically associate with the pulps, so.  (FYI, trigger warning for some ableism, but—well, we’ll get into it.)

“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!

Into the Wind: Intro (or, revisiting my introduction to romance).

Sixteen-year-old Rosie has no choice but to work in her father’s saloon where American and British sailors drink and continue the battle they fight at sea.  But when a drunken brawl leaves Rosie’s father dead and the Drop Anchor tavern burned to the ground everything changes.

Alone, without family, home, or a livelihood, Rosie has no choice but to go with Raider Lyons, the young sea captain who rescued her from the fire.  As American privateers and the British Navy battle one another on the high seas, Raider chases the brutal British captain who kidnapped his brother.  And Rosie, swept up in Raider’s obsession, is caught in a dangerous and merciless war at sea…and in a relentless battle against the growing passions within her heart.

In a departure from my usual content, today’s post harkens back to the first iteration of this blog, which was meant to be a place for me to get retrospective about books/media I’d consumed as a child.  That’s right, today we’re tackling (to some degree) Jean Ferris’ 1996 age-of-sail historical romance trilogy, Into the Wind, Song of the Sea, and Weather the Storm (sometimes informally dubbed the “Rosie and Raider” trilogy, after the main characters, natch).  As a result, this is going to be less of a review (because I have not, in fact, reread the books just yet) and more of a personal essay, just so you know.

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.