This blog has moved to https://pulpflakes.com/blog

This blog now has a new home: 

http://pulpflakes.com/blog

Since February 2022, I've been posting there. 27 posts so far, on the same topics as we love to chat about here.

One writer looks at the evolution of the western story

Wm Clayton and his magazines

Ralph S. Kendall on becoming a writer

British pulps – ads

Know their policy, insure against rejection

Double booked: Identity theft among authors

Meeting the editors – Butterick & Hersey

Meeting the editors – Munsey & Fiction House

Meeting the editors – Doubleday

Meeting the editors – Street & Smith

Crime Poetry

Harold Q. Masur – Newspaper profile

From Breaking Hearts to Broken Hearted: Ethel Rosemon’s story

Point, Counterpoint: Contemporary opinions of the pulps from 1940

Ham & Eggs: The successful pulp recipe of Alfred L. Gehri

“Reckless Ralph” Cummings: Newspaper profile of a dime novel collector

Allen Anderson – Frontier Stories, Summer 1950

Good Griff! British paperbacks of the 1950s

Stereotyping in the pulps

Pulp Art: Wings, December 1932 by Rudy Belarski

The woman behind Munsey’s science fiction/fantasy pulps

Update your links and join us there. For those of you using RSS:

https://pulpflakes.com/?feed=rss

Inside look: How Street & Smith handled manuscripts in the early 1920s

AFTER the author has hopefully dropped his manuscript in the mail-box, what happens when it reaches the offices of the Street & Smith Corporation, the largest publishers of fiction periodicals in the world? We will assume that your story has been addressed to one of the nine magazines—Popular, Ainslee’s, People’s, Top Notch, Love Stories, Detective Story, Western Story, Picture Play, Sea Stories—published monthly, fortnightly or weekly as the case may be.

Street & Smith building, New York

Free: One story every month

If you join my mailing list, I'll send one such story each month. The story might be a western, action, humorous, science fiction, fantasy, horror or anything that I like.

Stories which won't be worth reprinting on their own, but are still of interest to the readers of this blog. An unusual story for its genre, not long, not part of a series, or written by an author with a small output is hard to anthologize. But still worth reading.

Here's what I have lined up for the next 6 months:

A murdered man sends a message from beyond the grave.

A twisted tale of domestic malice involving diamonds and double dealing

Northwest noir from Murray Leinster

A pirate loots a Spanish galleon, and finds...

A grim western tale from a master of the genre

and a Johnston McCulley story.

Get a free story every month

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Issue Review: The Story-Teller, October 1924

The Story-Teller is a British pulp, described by Mike Ashley as "the best all-round all-fiction magazine of its day" in The age of the story-tellers, his survey of British fiction magazines. This issue, from 1924, is from around the middle of the magazine's run from 1907 to 1936. The editor was Newman Flower of Cassell and Co., the publishers.

There are big names in this issue -  G.K. Chesterton with an instalment of Tales of the Long Bow and Sax Rohmer is represented by his occult detective Paul Harley while Frank Shaw (the British equivalent of the prodigious H. Bedford-Jones) contributes three stories under different names. The other stories are by authors less well-known today. There are no story illustrations and only a few pages of advertisements. Two of the stories were from American authors, only one of which was a reprint. A few poems and fillers complete the magazine. The issue I read was coverless, from a bound volume.

The Story-Teller, October 1924

Further Notes on James Corbett: a tribute to William Deeck

James Corbett fans, rejoice. A cornucopia of Corbett's books are now listed on EBay and an autographed copy of The Merrivale Mystery sold yesterday for $261. They were the pride and joy of someone's collection; and if you aren't careful that someone could soon be you.

Books by James Corbett listed on EBay