The Pulps: ‘The Dinner Cooked in Hell’

We have been moving our way a story at a time through The Pulps, an anthology published in 1970. The last few entries have been through a section of the book called “Exploiting the Girls,” which contains examples of the seamier side of pulp literature. The last of the stories in this section is also the best, “The Dinner Cooked in Hell” by Mindret Lord, a tale from Startling Mystery Magazine, originally published in 1940.

The story is told in first person by a man who, along with his life, is arriving home in anticipation of hosting a small dinner. When they arrive at their house, however, the couple find that their usual maid is absent, and an exotically beautiful stranger, Lucia, has taken her place. Lucia seems to know her way around the kitchen, but the dishes she serves to the couple and her guest are strange in appearance and taste—and the reader can easily guess that they contain human flesh and blood. After Lucia serves up this gruesome meal, her henchmen arrive to capture the couple and their guests and murder them in a bizarre sacrifice.

Although I think this is the best story in this section, the editor, Tony Goodstone, is of the opposite opinion: He refers to Startling Mystery as one of the “really sadistic Pulps” whose stories were “belabored,” “forced,” and “self-conscious.” By contrast, I would say that, while grotesque, “Dinner” at least avoids the titillating exploitation of sexual violence that mars the other tales in this section.

The story’s great failing is that its protagonist is merely a passive observer of some ugly happenings, with the result that the story has no real plot, though it still succeeds as a work of horror because of its unsettling details. There is a harrowing escape at the end, but it takes place only because of chance and not because of any decisive action on the part of the characters.

The Pulps: ‘Hot Rompers’

This anthology through which we’re slowly walking, The Pulps, spends too much time on what its editor, Tony Goodstone, calls “under the counter” magazines, ones that were too graphic in their sexual content to be sold with the regular fair. Some of these, such as Spicy Detective, which we’ve already discussed, had a modicum of fame and influence, but many of the others are largely (and better left) forgotten. If Goodstone’s aim was to rehabilitate the reputation of the pulps by showcasing their quality and variety, he might have done better to leave the “under the counter” pulps under the counter where they belong. It is primarily because of these exploitative stories that this collection varies wildly in its quality, with Pulitzer winners rubbing shoulders with pornographers—but I suppose one could argue that this characterizes the pulps as a whole, a mixed bag of themed magazines whose readers never quite knew what they’d get when the next issue came out.

Speaking of pornographers, the next work in the collection is “Hot Rompers” by Russ West, which Goodstone describes as “passing as pornography in its day.” Although mild by the standards of the jaded internet age, we could argue that it still passes for pornography, assuming that we use pornography’s customary definition—a work designed for sexual titillation with no redeeming artistic quality.  The titillation “Hot Rompers” offered in 1931, when it appeared in Parisienne Life, might fail to move the modern reader who can see harder fare simply by turning on the television, but it is certainly designed to titillate, and it certainly lacks redeeming artistic quality. This is the worst story in the collection, hands down.

The story is mildly interesting when it begins, but it quickly derails. Our protagonist, the Frenchman Ferdinand de Brissac, is intent on murder: He has recently discovered that an American interloper has been sleeping with his wife. Gun in his pocket, he tracks this American scoundrel to a strip joint called the Club du Nord, where he finds him dallying with ladies of the evening.

This premise of vengeance in the sordid streets of Gay Paree is halfway interesting, but the plot ceases to exist after five paragraphs. A spotlight strikes the stage, a nude woman begins dancing (described in breathless detail, of course), and all is forgotten: Ferdinand follows this woman backstage, has a dalliance with her in her dressing room … and that’s about it. That’s the whole of the story.

“Hot Rompers” pretends to be nothing other than what it is, a work of light pornography, so we need say no more about it because it deserves to have no more said about it. Pornographic literature is very probably as old as human writing, and most of it has been easily forgotten dreck.

But since we’re on the subject, it calls certain other thoughts to my mind, so I will segue: It has long been my opinion that literature, for almost a century now, has been suffering under a curse first laid on it by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence, who wrote Lady Chatterly’s Lover among other things, believed that pornography could be rehabilitated, that it could be made sweet and tender, and that even the word fuck might be lovely and musical in certain contexts. Despite Lawrence’s own failure to make fuck sound and nice and gentle despite herculean effort, our literati have taken him at his word and have thus frequently subjected their readers to sex scenes that even the “under the counter” writers would blush at, scenes that mar otherwise competently written novels.

I used to follow a social media account that collected such scenes, though I decided to stop after it became too graphic. This account, run by a crotchety feminist, characterized badly written sex scenes as the fault of “men writing women,” but it became clear over time that the problem was neither men writing, nor men trying to describe women, but men trying to describe sex.

C. S. Lewis once explained why writing sex well is impossible. Among his other projects, he took on D. H. Lawrence’s premises and exploded them. He first did a linguistic study that proved, contra Lawrence, that swear words like fuck did not have some noble history that needed to be recalled and rehabilitated; rather, it is the custom in every language to set aside certain words associated with bodily functions and use them for the dual purpose of evoking belly laughs and inciting anger. Fuck is an ancient word that has always served these two purposes.

Lewis also, when interviewed for television on the subject of erotic literature, explained briefly and pointedly why explicit sex scenes are always so badly written—because an author who wants to describe sex explicitly is limited by the very nature of language; he can use the terminology of the operating theater or the terminology of the gutter, but he has no third option.

That is why the best literature dealing with sex does not address its subject directly but instead talks of gardens in bloom and scented unguents and leaping gazelles and flitting butterflies. The Bible itself teaches us this in the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s, one of the world’s greatest works of erotic literature. The reader who studies that book will notice, above all, that it contains no explicit or direct description of its subject. Indeed, it does not even dare to have a narrative structure but is instead content to be a powerful collection of evocative vignettes.

In the written word, metaphor is sexy but sex itself is not. In fact, this is true of any medium, not just writing: Bodies ramming into each other, when viewed by a third party, are gruesome, and that is why Hollywood made better romantic movies under the Hayes Code when it had to represent sex with waving curtains.

A writer of fiction who wishes to write about sex should avoid directly describing it for the same reason he should avoid giving dialogue to God: Because it inevitably diminishes the subject.

The Pulps: ‘Wake for the Living’

The last story in this collection that is marked as a mystery is “Wake for the Living” by Ray Bradbury. It is not really a detective story, but it was published, in 1947, in Dime Mystery Magazine. Many years ago in high school, I believed I had read everything Bradbury ever wrote, but I was of course mistaken, and this story is one I’m pretty sure I haven’t read before.

The story, like most of Bradbury’s, is simple. It is a standout in this collection not only because of the author’s fame but because it is characteristic of the author’s style: Poetical language, fantastical details, minimal plot, and an ironical, bitter ending.

To describe the story at any length is to give it away, though the ending is easy enough to see coming. The story features two brothers, Richard and Charles Braling, who hate each other. Both are elderly, and Charles, in his workshop, is building what he claims will be the ultimate coffin, capable of saving the expense of most funerals. The coffin is huge and full of complex mechanical parts. Charles asks to be buried in it when he dies, but his younger brother Richard defies his wishes.

Once Charles is dead and in the ground in a conventional coffin, Richard, out of curiosity, climbs into Charles’s invention. It turns out that the coffin is a machine capable of carrying out all the elements of a funeral and burial service by itself: It slams the lid shut on Charles, and the story from there proceeds just as you might expect.

This tale does not exactly have any unexpected twists, and aside from the mystery of what Charles’s coffin is (which the reader can easily guess), it contains no mystery. Bradbury’s whimsical writing, however, keeps it interesting despite its predictability.

The Pulps: ‘The Torture Pool’

As proof that the pulps are not lightly dismissed, we have a story by MacKinlay Kantor, who later won a Pulitzer for his novel Andersonville. This collection presents his story “The Torture Pool,” which appeared in 1932 in Detective Ficiton Weekly.

Despite the (evetual) credentials of its author, this story returns us to the general status of this collection: Solid, workmanlike, competent, and somewhat forgettable. The last story stood out because it was outrageous. This story, although one of the better ones in the mystery section, is not so outlandishly entertaining.

The story follows a man who runs gift shop in a small, out-of-the-way town that happens to be a tourist spot. His brother had been a hermit who’d amassed a small but respectable fortune through meager living and selling wild herbs, and he had, five years previous, been found dead, apparently killed for his money.

“The Torture Pool” is notable mostly for its atmosphere, capturing as it does the sun-drenched and swampy backwater in which it takes place. Unfortunately, it lacks tension: It follows a cold case, and the killer’s identity is obvious from the beginning. In fact, the story is not about finding out whodunnit but about the protagonist, who already knows whodunnit, finding a creative way to force the killer to confess (the “torture pool” of the title is a pool of quicksand). The climax is a little contrived, but the extensive cultural and environmental details make it engrossing.

The Pulps: ‘The Deadly Orchid’

Probably the best of the detective stories in the collection, or at least the most involved, is this one by T. T. Flynn, originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1933. The hard-boiled narrator has been hired to take down the “Orchid,” a seductress and blackmailer, who has incriminating letters that can destroy a banker. Teamed with a female sidekick with a sharp tongue, the narrator has pose as a newlywed and find a way to beat the Orchid at her own game.

The story rides largely on the banter between the characters, especially the narrator and the woman posing as his wife. They fight in the usual manner, displaying mutual exasperation and mutual attraction. The story’s conclusion hinges on some creative devices and a few implausibilities. It makes for entertaining reading, though there are no true surprises.

The Pulps: ‘One Hour’

Dashiell Hammett was one of the pioneers of “hard-boiled” detective fiction and is now considered one of the greatest mystery writers of all time, so this collection rightly includes an example of his work. Hammett led a colorful life, having worked as a Pinkerton agent and later serving a prison sentence for running a Communist front group, and he made considerable contributions not only to literature but to comic strips and film.

“One Hour” stars the Continental Op, one of his recurring characters, a detective working for the fiction Continental Detective Agency. “One Hour” contains a complicated murder mystery, but its gimmick, as suggested by the title, is that the Op solves it in only one hour’s time, mostly by stumbling upon the solution and then engaging in a lengthy battle as he corners the evildoers. Goodstone apparently selected it to showcase the directness and brevity of Hammett’s narration.

The story finds the Op asked to solve a murder committed with a stolen car. Despite the terse description and brief time span, the story is a bit hard to follow as grasping both the mystery itself and its solution requires the reader to keep careful track of certain spatial relationships between streets and buildings. However, its centerpiece is neither the mystery nor its solution but the fistfight at the climax, which fills a full page and a half of a six-page story.

Much as I enjoyed reading this, I can’t help but ask if it’s the best example of Hammett’s work. It’s an early story, published in Black Mask in 1924, and its gimmick makes it feel anticlimactic since the Op solves the mystery with such little legwork, hitting on the answer while still doing the preliminary, routine questioning of witnesses and suspects.

The Pulps: ‘Mr. Alias, Burglar’

As we get into the mystery-story section of The Pulps, we first encounter “Mr. Alias, Burglar” by Ridrigues Ottolengui. Although amusing in a way, it is obviously inspired by Sherlock Holmes and suffers from the defects of some of the worst Sherlock Holmes stories.

The tale opens by introducing Mitchel, a wealthy and extremely self-confident amateur detective who apparently solves murder cases after the typical drawing-room fashion. A man who goes by the name of Alias approaches him and declares that he can rob him without his detection. They agree to bet on this and then go their separate ways, Alias to the work of committing ther robbery and Mitchell to the work of foiling or detecting it.

As Tony Goodstone points out in his brief commentary on this story, it commits the “cardinal sin” of revealing all the clues at the end instead of delivering them throughout the story for the reader to figure out—but it has to do this because there is really no mystery here. Instead, the story features Mitchell mind-reading, predicting the future, and jumping to conclusions, all while pretending that his baseless assumptions are the power of deduction. Much as Holmes leaps to the conclusion that Watson must have been in India because he has a suntan—and turns out to be correct because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have it so—Mitchell precisely guesses when and in what way Alias will perform certain acts, and what his reactions will be to certain phenomena.

The story is entertaining mostly because of the dialogue: In the key scenes, these two men arrogant men, both supposing themselves to be intellectual giants, exchange verbal barbs. Their ripostes are fun to read, but they don’t have nearly the gravity that Ottolengui apparently thought they did.

The Pulps: ‘Tough Enough’

The collection of Western stories ends with a tale by Luke Short, who was as popular as Max Brand and whose work inspired multiple movies. “Tough Enough” was published in Argosy, the mother of pulps, in 1937.

This story follows the familiar premise of the stranger who rides into a town run by a criminal gang and leaves a trail of bodies behind him. Fisful of Dollars has of course become the archetype of that story but didn’t originate it, and the Short’s story differs enough from the now-established cliches to hold a few surprises. There are some secret identities and a double cross, and the tale is both well-told and generally engaging.

The Pulps: ‘ A Ticket Outside’

More exciting is Robert Ormond Case’s “Ticket Outside,” originally published in Western Story Magazine in 1933. Set in the Yukon, this tale of petty revenge follows “Wild Pete” Judson, who recently scraped together enough gold dust to buy his way out of the frozen north and return to civilization—but before he leaves, he wants to rub his success in the face of a partner he’s cheated and short-shrifted for years, just to get one final dig in. Despite the deadly cold weather, Pete’s partner has been forced by necessity to drive a stage, and Pete wants to meet him on the road just to show him the gold he’s gathered before heading to warmer climes.

“Wild Pete” is a character the reader is invited to love to hate, and it comes as no surprise when he receives his comeuppance through a series of ironical twists. The story works well primarily because Case is excellent and depicting the setting, a frozen, howling wasteland where life hangs by a narrow thread. Also, the story’s climax is genuinely satisfying even if it’s hardly unexpected.

The Pulps: ‘Butler’s Nag’

Since the Westerns form the largest section of this anthology, the next story up is “Butler’s Nag” by Frank Richardson Pierce, which appeared in Western Story Magazine in 1925. The story is about an old cow puncher who had a fondness for a horse and later, in retirement, improbably finds him again and rescues him from a glue factory.

“Butler’s Nag” oozes with sentimentality. Although there is some slight suspense when it is unclear whether Butler will rescue his horse in time, several improbably devices appear to make sure everything turns out all right. The conclusion is downright anticlimactic.