As a Sealed Book: Introduction

So I had hoped to have As a Sealed Book (my Beulah Poynter anthology, previously announced here) already finished and available for purchase by now, but unfortunately some family emergencies (at least one of which is still technically ongoing) blew up my personal life and caused a delay.  The project is still (slowly) chugging along, though, and I’m pleased to share what will be the official introduction with you today.  Interested in what Poynter was like as a person?  Curious as to what this collection might have in store beyond “forgotten pulp mysteries”?  Then this is the post for you!  Below, you’ll find a general biographical essay (she was quite a fascinating lady!), and then a secondary essay that gets more into the specifics of the featured stories, both in terms of plot and why I think they’re worth remembering/resurrecting.  As mentioned, there will be five stories in total (two novellas, three novelettes, in that order), and I can now provide a formal word count:  Not counting the intro and afterword, the book will clock in at (roughly) 85,800 words.

Anyway, please enjoy, and keep in mind that this may yet be subject to tweaks or edits before things go to publication (I guess I’m worried it will be too long once I get it formally laid out?).

Announcement: As a Sealed Book (or, join me as I hop on the self-pub bandwagon).

The blog has been pretty quiet as of late, and that’s mostly because I’ve (shock!—gasp!) been busy putting an anthology together!  (Actually multiple anthologies—at least two—but we’ll get to that.)  Long story short, I fell deep into a Beulah Poynter hole, hunted down some neat mysteries she wrote in the late-1910s and early-’20s, found myself thinking what a shame it was that they were never formally collected, and then decided to…collect them myself?  After all, I have no industry clout, but I do have graphic design skills, and self-publishing is a viable option these days, so…why not, yeah?

So click through to see the (working) cover reveal!  (I may yet tweak the font sizes a little.)

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 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.

“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:

“The Very First Breakfast”: Seriously, though, I really don’t think Woolrich was as into “old-fashioned” girls or gender politics as might have previously been assumed.

“Oh, no-o, Kittens, no-o, not at all,” he protested insincerely.  He patted her hand soothingly.  “You’re probably a swell little cook, only—”

“Only what?”  There was more than a hint of amusement in Kittens’ purring voice.

“Only I didn’t think up-to-date business girls like you,” he faltered, “cared much about cooking or—or knew much about it.”

There was a determined gleam in Kittens’ eyes by now.  She’d show him.  “So he thinks just because a girl’s in business and matches her husband’s salary every week she’s helpless in the kitchen, can’t cook like Mother used to, does he?” she thought.  “We’ll see about that!”

Back with another Cornell Woolrich piece, this time “The Very First Breakfast,” which was published in the June 1934 issue of Serenade, a “slick” magazine of the day (and in fact what The Illustrated Love Magazine of the earlier ’30s turned into).  To date, the story has only been collected in the tragically-rare 2008 anthology, The Good Die Young—and Other Early Tales of Romance, but I happened to get my hands on a digital copy via an online acquaintance who has institutional access to the Interwar Culture database.  (Curious readers who are similarly lacking access can find a PDF of the story here.)  The story (a definite short one) is often lumped in with Woolrich’s early romances, but honestly, it reads more like a comedy sketch than anything else:  Newlyweds Kittens and Ken Roberts have just returned from their honeymoon, and are settling into their first place together, with Kittens determined to both save money and play Domestic Goddess by cooking breakfast (as opposed to them consistently going out in the mornings, natch).  Ken, who knows his “funny-paper jokes” about brides’ (stereotypically terrible) cooking is hesitant, but when the morning of truth comes, Kittens has produced—much to his pleasant surprise—a delicious spread of crispy bacon, fluffy muffins, and “rich, golden-brown” coffee.  As we find out in the last paragraph, however, the twist is that Kittens had the whole thing provided by a local restaurant—a stop-gap measure until she’s “enough advanced in her cooking lessons to do without the help of a caterer.”

And now for something different: BGSU!

As has been mentioned before in various posts, I’m lucky enough to live within driving distance of Bowling Green State University and their pop culture library, and I FINALLY made it down there this week!  What was supposed to be a one-day visit turned into a two-day visit, due to me 1.) biting off far more than I could chew the first day, and 2.) actually having the time to spare, such that I could afford a second trip.  BGSU is one of the few places to have a dedicated romance collection, which means their romance pulps (while still nowhere near complete in terms of full runs of titles) are at least far more robust than a lot of other places.  You are (unsurprisingly) not allowed to make scans or photocopies of the magazines, as it stresses the binding too much, but you are allowed to take all the photographs you want.  I have since gotten pretty damn good at photographing pulps (if I do say so myself), so I brought a little kit with weights and props and went to town.