The dark side of the pulps

Not all editors were saints...

PULP MAGAZINE EDITORS HELD ON SWINDLE CHARGES

Police Say Pair Forged, Cashed Checks for Manuscripts Never Submitted.

NEW YORK. Jan. 24. Two pulp magazine editors were held today on charges of grand larceny; and forgery in connection with an alleged $96,000 swindle in which Assistant District Attorney Charles S. Woolsey said they forged and cashed checks made out by their firms for manuscripts that were not submitted.

The editors, Kenneth W. Hutchinson, 45. and Wilton Matthews, 36, were arrested last night in Woolsey’s  office. Woolsey said that for three years the editors had contrived to have their firms, the Arrow Publishing Company, Inc., and Trojan Publishing corporation, make out checks to well-known authors which the editors then cashed.

For two years, Woolsey said, the editors also purloined notices of income sent the writers for tax purposes, but one such notice was received by T. W. Ford, a writer - for $2850 that he had not received. He reported it to Frank Armer, general manager of the companies, who asked Woolsey to Investigate.

Woolsey said the editors, learning of the Investigation, sent Ford a letter telling him the notice had been sent through error, and sent another letter to Armer over Fords forged signature, saying that he was in error in reporting he had not received the $2,850 in question. One of the 16 magazines for which the editors handled stories carries at the end of each story, "Crime does not pay."


And not all plots were original, as you can see from this clip

Taken from the movie Blond Inspiration, it's the story of a pulp magazine author turned editor. Synopsis of the movie, courtesy TCM.

Pulp links roundup - July 2019 edition part 2

More links from around the web.

Everett Raymond Kinstler, who passed away on May 26, remembered his illustration work in an interview, courtesy The Comics Journal.

Steven Brower: How did you get started?

Everett Raymond Kinstler: With the pulps. They were on 42nd Street and Third Ave. And they must have had a hundred pulp magazines. The owner was Harry Steeger. And there was one sort of rogue pulp magazine, being published and I remember the office was at Rockefeller Center. And the woman’s name was Dorothy McIlwraith. If you were to say to me how do you possibly remember 75 years ago, I am telling you I see her as clearly as I see you. And she had one publication, which was called Short Stories. That’s all they published and it was a monthly. 

A real life story that was the inspiration for Burroughs' Tarzan? Read on in ERBZine, the biggest online web fanzine for Tarzan.

Sam Moskowitz article on Virgil Finlay in Worlds of Tomorrow, November 1965. Covers his life and career. Scroll down a bit or search for "SAM MOSKOWITZ",

Reviews of Lawrence Block’s short story collections One Night Stands And Lost Weekends,  and Enough Rope including stories from the crime digests of the 1950s

A nice review of a new collection of early science fiction from the pulps and digests all written by women, courtesy the New York Review of Books. The collection is The future is female, compiled by Lisa Yaszek.

 The anthology dispels the commonly held belief that women didn’t participate much in science fiction before the Seventies and argues that a category of fiction often thought to be socially retrograde, technologically fetishistic, and poorly written is in fact rich in style and humanity. 

Pulp links roundup - July 2019 edition

[It's much easier to search than to research :-). And in that spirit of summer laziness, here's a quick roundup of pulp links from around the web.]

Weird Tales might be dead, but research into it is still going on today. And funded at a university too...courtesy the University of Arkansas.

John Locke of Off-Trail Publications gave an interview about Margie Harris, the queen of the gangster pulps.

A new book recently came out on modernism and the use of street slang in American writing. This interview with the book's author covers Dashiell Hammett's writing and correspondence, and a file of underworld slang found in his papers stored at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin.

Book here (disable ad-blocker to see the link):

More academic research on the pulps. A call for papers on "The Age of the Pulps: the SF magazine, 1926–1960", from Maynooth University, Ireland.

Someone discovered a cache of pulp magazines under the floor boards of a house being demolished in Australia. Has anyone here made a find like this? Leave a note in the comments...

And finally, the weird art of Mexican pulps...

Donald Francis McGrew - Author, Journalist

I first came across one of Don McGrew's stories in The Frontier, a year ago. After reading one, i wanted more. Came across his other pirate story in The Frontier, thanks to Pulpmags.org. It was as good as the first one, and i got interested. Here's what i found out about him.

Donald Francis McGrew, c. 1930

Elliot W. Chess – Fighter pilot, Author

Elliott Chess c. 1926, courtesy the University of Texas at El Paso

[Recently read Chess’ first story in Western Story magazine, The Sign of the Skull, an unusual western story of revenge set in a pirates’ inn in the Chihuahuan Desert. After reading the story, I wanted to learn more about the author and what I found was enough to warrant this article.]