John Hattaway

Lately, one of my little pleasures in life has been reading old crime fiction. Crime Noir. We’ve talked about this before.

When I say it’s one of my little pleasures I mean it. There isn’t a lot of time, in the day or week, to sit down and just enjoy a little bit of extra-curricular fiction. Truth told, there isn’t any time to enjoy the extra-curricular fiction; but I still force it in. Back when I would look at college students and scoff at them for not reading stuff they enjoyed while in school I made a promise, to myself, that I would continue to read the stuff I really enjoy. So, little pleasure and crime fiction go hand-in-hand.

Point in case, I just finished reading Fade to Blonde by Max Philips this afternoon. In part while I was sitting in math class trying to sort of listen to a substitute math teacher explain material that is better gotten out of the book; and part of the final pages in Bennion’s office waiting for him to come and critique some introductory pages of fiction I’d sent as a part of the class I have with him. Bennion was down the hall talking to one of his associates (someone I wanted to meet actually) and I got to nose around his office, look at the oil paintings he had stacked in a corner, scan the books on his shelves, and pretty much make myself nosey… until I realized that I had this “little pleasure” sitting in my bag with two or three pages left to read.

When this thought struck, I sat down, pulled the book from the bag, and read a rather disappointing ending to a, previously, not too bad book.

My favorite line, in the book, is, “…two balloons on a string….” With the interesting follow-up line (about age), “…two empty balloons on a string….” I would imagine the imaginative among you can figure out what is being described. If not, then you’re not all that imaginative and you still haven’t figured out what the nature, and tone, of the pulp fiction I’ve been reading is all about.

The book actually takes place in, and around, Los Angeles, CA. You don’t get a lot of descriptive elements about LA. Only that there are specific places where the characters go that lead them, consistently, back to where they started out. One of the characters, toward the end of the book, says, “When we met you were going to kick me in the face,” and then she proceeds to kick the guy she’s with in the chest with her bare feet and in the face. Never hard, just enough to make her point.

Many of these books prove to be very interesting. As an aside, I read a Robert Heinlein novel the other month. I think that was back toward the beginning of January. I really like Heinlein’s writing. Anyway, read this book with new eyes because I’ve been reading a lot of things that were designed as “pulp” fiction. Pulp refers to the cheap paper used in publication and, as such, were sold very inexpensively. The books were not designed to stand the ravages of time. This, by the by, is where you get the “dime store novels”. Heinlein’s tradition juveniles meet the criteria, though through the scifi genre, of the kinds of pulp fiction I enjoy reading. With Heinlein, though, he touches on various forms of sexuality (in these books) that he more fully explores in his other works. This further leads the reader down a primrose path that the pulps were designed to go down, e.g. promise a lot more than you are actually delivering. In the case of most pulps, promise sexy women, hard men, crime, sex and death.

Point in case is the books from the publisher I’ve been reading through. They introduce the reader to a whole new world of crime fiction. New authors. New ways of telling stories. New styles. And, in some cases, an environment wherein the reader and the author can explore ideas (sometimes of a sexual nature) that are not explored in other genres or avenues of fiction. With these novels you look at “…two balloons on a string…,” differently than you would, “…and she was well endowed,” or, “the lady had the largest mams I’d ever seen,” (last two are examples written by me). You wouldn’t pick up a literary work and expect any of these descriptions. Try, “…she had large breast. Much larger than was normal, or comfortable, on a woman of her size. There was no way [the protagonist] was convinced that she could be comfortable with breasts that large…,” and then continue with exposition or personal inquiry on “why” or other observations. This is an element of writing.

In pulp fiction you don’t explore tones of physical sexuality the same way you would through a literary or scholarly work. The rules (though sometimes broken) are set so that you use different language and vernacular to talk about endowments. This is important when realizing that the act of writing is, in part, being aware of where to drawn the line with various conventions and descriptive elements. In pulp one of the protagonists is interest in the sexual aspect of the principle female character (whether protagonist or antagonist) which, in turn, is an element that helps define who the character is.

Whether consciously intentional or not (this is coming from a recent meeting with Bennion) you begin to see into the mind of specific characters when you delve into why something is spoken about (and what that something is) in various parts of a story or a chapter. If the POV (point of view) character is observing something that is, in part, important to the character AND important to the overall story and plot of the piece being worked on.

When reading pulp (and I’ve been on this kick for a while now) you read the aspects that are titillating to the intended audience. These characteristics deal, extensively, with damsels in distress and the notions of sexuality. They are meant to be titillation. They are meant to draw in a reader and, for a short 50,000 words, entertain the reader through various aspects of a story. There isn’t a lot of details that are unnecessary, and character development in limited to what can be shoved into the scant 50k. You hone the process down to the raw elements.

Regardless, these stories, though not high fiction, are not bad stories either. I enjoy, and read for fun, a lot of literary works. Mostly old stuff (though that Margaret Atwood piece is a lot newer than what I normally read). When I went looking for something light, six or more months ago, the people at Borders (whom I’d worked with) were surprised that I wanted something that wasn’t more scholarly in nature. They had a hard time picturing me reading something that didn’t require time and effort and then talking about it with whomever was willing to listen (okay, the last part is rarely true because I don’t know a lot of people into the same kinds of writing as me), but case in point I walked away, that night, with a book by Kurt Vonnegut that I didn’t really like and that was supposed to be lighter in tone than what I was normally reading.

Back then (six months ago is a back then???) I hadn’t really read a lot of pulp, or pulp I’d recognized, outside of some Dashiell Hammett. I like him. The author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man books. I think there is value in the writing and a growing market for someone who has the foresight and financial ability to produce something along the lines of pulp books. Publishing is expensive and it doesn’t have to be. You don’t, necessarily, lose creativity, ability, or even readership by selling something for less. You actually can gain quite a bit of ground by doing so.

Anyway, I’m done for now. Fine