The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

The pop culture of the 1960s did not act as a corrective to the academic void. In the comics, we had Betty or Veronica fighting over the dubious prize of Archie Andrews. At the movies, all I remember is Julie Andrews, who seemed to find fulfillment in tending to others’ children. On television, the highlight of the week was the June Taylor Dancers, spreading their legs in synch. (That’s not a double entendre, but a perfectly literal description of the geometric patterns the dancers made when the camera switched to an overhead shot.) I thought it was marvelous, but I doubted I could ever perform such feats. Even then, I knew I wasn’t a team player.

How desperate was I for a role model? Desperate enough to fixate on Lois Lane, as played by Noel Neill in all but one season of the Adventures of Superman television series with George Reeves. As I parsed it out, an extremely lucky girl might grow up to be a lady reporter and, occasionally, someone would kidnap her and gag her, and then Superman would show up. Also, one would wear a lot of hats. Fated, perhaps, by my double-L initials, like Lois, I did become a reporter, but a hatless one, and Superman never once put in an appearance.

The point is, I might have been better off with a steady diet of the pulps. Certainly, I wouldn’t have been any worse. True, the pulps of the early-twentieth century will never be mistaken for proto-feminist documents. As Otto Penzler notes in his foreword, the motif of rescue is as prevalent here as it was in any Superman episode. Still, even if women seldom take the lead in these stories, there is just enough kink in these archetypes of girlfriend/hussy/sociopath to hint at broader possibilities for the female of the species.

Take Polly Knight in Randolph Barr’s “The Girl Who Knew Too Much.” She seems to be little more than a gang-girl Pocahantas, offering to sacrifice her rosy flesh — and we are frequently reminded of its pink perfection — for the sake of the newspaperman she has met by chance. Polly, as it turns out, is not quite the damsel in distress that she appears to be.

Creamy skin, along with jaw-dropping beauty, is a frequent motif in these stories, as are gray eyes, most notably in Dashiell Hammett’s “The Girl with the Silver Eyes.” Here, the Continental Op comes face to face with an old nemesis, and marvels at the effect this chameleon has on every man she meets. “Porky Grout, whose yellowness was notorious from Seattle to San Diego, standing rigidly in the path of a charging metal monster, with an inadequate pistol in each hand... She had done that to Porky Grout, and he hadn’t even been human!” The story is vintage Hammett — and provides a lovely inside joke, the red herring of a Baltimore address only a few blocks south from where Hammett lived as a boy.

Raymond Chandler’s story here is also vintage, albeit an immature one, if you will. One doesn’t need to be a Chandler scholar to spot some very familiar elements — an unsavory book dealer with a penchant for kinky photos, a wild-eyed thumb-sucker named Carmen, and a dead chauffeur. “Killer in the Rain” should be taught in college creative writing courses, if only as an object lesson in how a disciplined writer can reshape material, deepening its themes and expanding its possibilities.

The most dynamic female in these stories, for my money, is the avenging angel in Cornell Woolrich’s “Angel Face.” Although she requires a timely rescue in the end, her resourcefulness and bravery are beyond question. For the love of her brother, she withstands torture and risks death. But, as she tells us in the story’s first paragraph when she refers to her makeup as war paint, she’s being quite literal.

Of course, the reader inclined to pick up this volume is probably already steeped in the work of Chandler, Hammett, and Woolrich. Even for the pulp cognoscenti, there are multiple treasures to be unearthed, the style ranging from a little campy to downright classic. Your mileage may vary, as the kids say now, but I was particularly taken by Perry Paul’s Dizzy Malone in “The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen,” piloting her plane above the Atlantic Ocean and surviving a fusillade of bullets. (Take that, Amelia Earhart!) And I feel as if I found a new friend in the acerbic, absurdly competent Sarah Watson, featured in D. B. McCandless’s “He Got What He Asked For.”

Around the time that I read this anthology, the United States was titillated — there is no other word — by the story of an astronaut who drove cross-country to confront a romantic rival. Determined to make good time on the 800-mile-plus journey, the astronaut wore an adult diaper. The items packed for the trip included a BB gun, a four-inch folding buck knife, a new steel mallet, black gloves, rubber tubing, and plastic garbage bags. We may never know exactly what was planned, for the intended victim foiled the attack and the assailant was arrested and charged with attempted murder.