Son of a Gun Got the Drop on Me: Recycled Pulp

"These guys unknowingly created art out of poverty," he says. "They weren't trying to be artists, just to make a living. In some shape or form, a lot of them lived the lives that found their way onto the page."

He's not kidding.

Cain, married four times, wrote about adultery and dames so desirable that men would kill to get them. Cornell Woolrich was a closeted gay man who lived in a seedy Harlem hotel with his mother and was so lonely he dedicated stories to his typewriter. He died weighing less than 90 pounds. Alcoholic Roger Torrey and his girlfriend wrote stories side by side with a bottle of whiskey between them; the first one to finish got to start drinking first. Other writers whose work is included in this volume hid behind pen names and not even Penzler could discover anything about them. They are stories left behind by anonymous men, tombstones with no bodies beneath them.

The best of them all, Chandler, had his own alcohol and sexual issues (women almost always kill people in his books), but he famously summed up the genre's ethos in a 1944 essay, "The Simple Art of Murder." He said that Hammett was brilliant and wrote for "people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street." He said Hammett gave murder "back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons."

The sophisticated crime stories that developed in the wake of these forgotten pulps so dominate our cultural landscape now that we hardly notice their origins. Go to any bookstore, you'll see an entire section devoted to mystery or crime. Go to the theater, turn on the television, and the pulps' descendants are everywhere. "No Country for Old Men." "The Sopranos." "Gone Baby Gone." "The Departed." "Fargo." "The Wire." "L.A. Confidential." "The Godfather." "Mystic River." And, the clearest ode of them all, "Pulp Fiction."

The hardboiled detective story traces its official birth to the May 15, 1923, edition of Black Mask. This was publication date of Carroll John Daly's "Three Gun Terry." Hammett published his first stories later the same year and the genre took off. It was a transcendent moment for American creative arts: Hollywood was in its infancy, moving from silent films to talkies. Jazz was spreading from New Orleans. The Harlem Renaissance was underway. And fiction was birthing a violent new offspring.

Daly, as Penzler observes, was "a hack writer devoid of literary pretension, aspiration and ability." He was so bad that when Richard B. Schwartz, author of "Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction," reads Daly's stuff to his English class at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he says the kids laugh out loud.

Hammett, on the other hand, was a genius. Both men wrote in short, muscular sentences that drove the action forward. They were writing this before the great titan of American strong-armed lit, Ernest Hemingway, published his first novel, Penzler points out.

"These stories helped change the way American narratives present real speech, in the power of these short, declarative sentences," says Keith Alan Deutsch, publisher of Blackmask.com, the magazine's revived, online descendant. "It's not to say that this wasn't there in higher art, but the pulps were certainly a force" in what a lot of people read.

All this started just after World War I. There was a wide audience of young, blue-collar men who could read but not too well, and they really liked the western stories printed in cheap magazines. There had been English mystery stories of the drawing room sort, and Edgar Allan Poe had written marvelous suspense stories. But Daly and Hammett took the cowboy frontier ethic and transposed it into violent stories about unpolished urban people, crime, alcohol, a tough-but-decent guy with a gun, a buxom woman in (or causing) trouble, and bad guys.

Close the lid, blend and serve.

People didn't just do things in these stories, either. They did them with outrageous, simile-laden flair.