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.

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!

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! 🎃

Vintage Article: “Successful Pulp Writer Gives Details of Craft”

In a departure for my vintage article feature, I’m pulling not from a trade journal today, but from an actual newspaper.  Basically, inspired by my enjoyment of “Lady Snob,” I decided to see if I could unearth anything about the author, Beth Farrell.  Due to “Beth Farrell” being a pretty common name, the search wasn’t going too well—until an online acquaintance took the unprompted initiative, put their newspapers.com subscription to use, and kindly shared the subsequent article with me (originally published in the St. Joseph News-Press—of St. Joseph, Missouri—on November 13th, 1940).  In it, it’s revealed that “Beth Farrell” was actually a pseudonym of Pearle E. Botsford—and was in fact just one of many pseudonyms!  An extremely prolific pulp writer, Botsford wrote under her own name, but also apparently under those of Sally Noon Burrell, Barnaby Ives, Mimi Trumbell, June Vare Davis, Henri Bonat, Bobby Barnes, and—of course—Beth Farrell.  While some of these, like the Farrell pseudonym, seem to have been employed primarily to avoid flooding the market, others (when cross-referenced with The FictionMags Index) appear to have been reserved for specific genres—“Sally Noon Burrell” being used for Western romances, “Barnaby Ives” for “girly” titles, etc.

While the article is, first and foremost, an interview with Botsford, focusing on her career, it also includes some neat insight into the craft of pulp writing itself, and particularly romance pulp writing.  Perhaps even more pleasantly, the author, Richard Altman, appears to take her career as a romance writer seriously, with none of the patronizing digs—whether subtle or not—that you might expect from a male journalist in 1940 (and that you can, unfortunately, still find all-too-often in romance journalism today, from those who approach the genre as outsiders).  It’s a fun read, for sure (though fair warning that the word “gypsy” does get used in passing at one point), and I have to admit that I do wonder just which editors Botsford had in mind when she mentioned a couple specifically, albeit not by name…

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: