CRIME WITH A HITCH

by Steve Steinbock

The other day I picked up the latest issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine at the bookstore. It is a gem of an issue. From stem to stern, this issue was a treat well worth the sixty-four bits I paid out for it. (Full disclosure: As of this writing, I haven’t read every story).

A few highlights: John Dirckx’ police procedural about a burglary leading to a thirty-year-old cold case was very clever, tightly plotted and written. Melodie Campbell’s “Santa Baby” was a short stocking stuffer with a wonderful twist. Kathy Lynn Emerson’s entry features her “Face Down” protagonist Lady Appleton in a story that begins with a sixteenth century soccer match and ends with – let’s just say that things work out for Susanna’s love-crossed step-daughter.

I must gush. The two stand-out stories in the batch were the seventh and eighth in the issue. And they happen to be by two of my Criminal Brief colleagues. James Lincoln Warren’s “Shanghaied” is a clever retelling of Stevenson’s Kidnapped, with the same cast of characters and the same essential storyline, but the setting and the tone are storm-tossed and several sheets to the wind. The story shows JLW’s amazing talent with voice, with the story told (like in Stevenson’s original) from the point of view of young David Balfour, whom JLW has recast as a hooligan in the style of Huck Finn. As a sample of Jim’s style, consider the line, “Pa! Don’t die! Not without you give me your wallet first!”

John M. Floyd’s story, “Remembering Tally,” shows the author’s talent for setting up a situation and then executing it tightly, economically, and with a light, entertaining style. The story, apropos of the recent political season, involves a gubernatorial candidate, J. Talmadge Byrd, showing his true feathers under pressure. The story elicited more than a few utterly satisfying chuckles from this reader.

This isn’t the first time JLW and John Floyd’s stories have appeared side by side in the pages of AHMM. Ten years ago, in the May, 1999 issue, Jim introduced us to Hero, the valet/ secretary of insurance indagator Alan Treviscoe in “Black Spartacus,” immediately followed by John’s amusing mall-side caper, “Lindy’s Luck.”

My only beef with this current issue is with the cover art. Can someone explain it to me? The cover shows a man’s left hand holding a long-stemmed pink rose to the partially obscured face of a young woman. The trouble is that at first, second, and third glance, the rose looks like a duck’s beak on the girl’s face. I don’t get it.

Pulp Friction

Like the ebb and flow of tides, seasons, and Wall Street, language has a natural propensity to change. Words get generalized and specifized according to the needs of the people who use them. The word cow once referred to mature females of various large mammal species, but today you’ll hear the word applied almost exclusively to bovines, often regardless of gender or age. Since Shakespeare’s day, the word punk (a female prostitute) has undergone a complete sex-change and M.O. When Dashiell Hammett slipped the word gunsel (Yiddish for “young goose”) past the censors, he was describing Kaspar Gutman’s homosexual companion, Wilmer. Hammett fooled not only the censors, but most other people who have assumed that “gunsel” means “gunman.”

Hammett brings us to the word Pulp.

Pulp is the fibrous material from soft wood that is turned into a soupy mash and made into paper. It also has a convenient tough-guy usage, as “to be beaten to a pulp.”

I don’t mind it when people use “pulp” to describe a subgenre rather than a printing medium (that’s not true; I do mind), but I get irritated when the origin of the term gets lost in the paper-mill of history.

Even before Quentin Tarantino put it on the marquee of every mall Cineplex, pulp fiction was an expression that was being bandied, overused, and exhausted.

Pulps were magazines printed on really cheap wood pulp paper (as
opposed to newsprint or glossy paper). Black Mask was a pulp. Dime Detective was a pulp. Both of these featured stories that ranged, over the years, from the hardest of the hard-boiled to the cleverest of the puzzlers. The stories in these pulp magazines were also, by and large, pretty good.

Not all the pulps contained stories of a high quality, however. “Spicy Detective” and its ilk printed stories that were entertaining, but not terribly well written or memorable. The pulps weren’t just hard-boiled crime magazines, either. There were sports pulps, western pulps, romance pulps, and science fiction pulps. So technically, a Mike Shayne novel with a sexy Robert McGinnis cover is not pulp fiction, but a story in Ranch Romance is. Lurid paperbacks like Gang Girl or Six Deadly Dames are not pulps, but stories by Horatio Alger, Upton Sinclair, O. Henry, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (all of whom appeared in early issues of Argosy Magazine) are.

Digest-ion

Manhunt (1953-1967) was not a pulp magazine. Like Hitchcock and Queen, it was a digest. A digest is a smaller magazine (roughtly 5½ x 8¼ inches), usually printed on newsprint with heavy or glossy covers. The name digest isn’t very descriptive. In fact, it probably comes from the name of the most popular magazine of that size, Reader’s Digest. Despite the subtle size shifts in recent years, Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen are both digest magazines.

But about Manhunt. It was a marvelous magazine that featured stories by Ed McBain, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Frank Kane, and probably several others whose names also rhyme, as well as greats like William Irish (AKA Cornell Woolrich), Kenneth Millar (better known by his nom de plume Ross Macdonald), Craig Rice, and Richard Prather. Several of Lawrence Block’s early works appeared in that digest. I would guess that it was stories like those in Manhunt – and not those in the actual pulps – that inspired Tarantino’s movie.

So let’s hear it for Digest Fiction!