Adventure House Guide to the Pulps

Penzler Pick, November 2000: I'm a sucker for good reference books about mystery fiction and this one is pretty good, if extremely limited to those who remember the great era of pulp magazines and collect them. Pulps (in case you are really young and don't know about them) were very inexpensive magazines that flourished during the period shortly before WWI to just after WWII. They were filled with fiction produced at a prodigious pace by writers who worked for a penny a word--or two cents if they established a reputation and a following. Beginning with general interest pulps, such as All-Story and Popular, the enormous success of these inexpensive treasure troves of fiction quickly brought spinoffs that were more narrowly focused. Fans of romance fiction could go to the newsstand for a copy of Love Adventures, Love Book Magazine,Love Fiction Monthly, Love Romances, Love Story Magazine, Love Short Stories, and dozens of others. Readers who wanted westerns had the same huge range, as did those who preferred science fiction, fantasy, sports, railroads, jungle stories, and so on.

But the most popular fiction of all was the mystery, and there were hundreds of specialty magazines that catered to that taste. Black Mask was the most famous, serving as the springboard for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among many others, but equally popular were Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective, not to mention the great "hero" pulp, The Shadow. There was a lot of junk between the covers of many of these magazines, but a lot of great stuff, too, which is why they are so eagerly collected. And this is the perfect book for pulp collectors. Every pulp is listed in an easy-to-read format, together with the total number of issues for each publication. Best of all, because of the erratic publishing schedule for many of these periodicals, there is a listing for the date of every issue, so if the publisher skipped a week, or a month, or changed titles for a few issues, the completist will quickly see what the collection lacks. A quick flip to the entry for Black Mask, for example, reveals that it was published from April of 1920 through July of 1951, with a total of 340 issues, making it one of the longest running as well as the best of all mystery pulps. On the other hand, there was only one issue of Crime Fiction Stories, so if you have one and liked it, don't search for another. No pulp fan should be without this massive guide. --Otto Penzler