Pulp Tension
by Gary Phillips
Being a freelance writer is about always being anxious and tense. I finish one thing and I worry is what I’ve done any good and then I worry what can I hustle next for a paycheck. As I write this current column for FourStory, I’ve also got to get in any last minute edits to the Underbelly manuscript to my editor at PM Press. Now true believers as some of you may know or recall, The Underbelly first began as a serialized novella here at FourStory way back in July of 2007, the month that this lovely site premiered. The serial ran for sixteen biweekly installments and finished in February ’08. It was my first time writing a serial and I’ve compared it, albeit slightly, to how Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas used to grind out the words in chapters for the respective newspapers of their day.
Once they were done, these swinging studs, to use Lord Buckley’s phrase, would also collect their installments into book form. I don’t know about those cats, but I learned that even though I had an outline of The Underbelly to provide a rough guide of the story’s structure and who the main characters were and their relationship to each other, I had to be careful not to write myself into too big of a corner. For instance back in the day of Saturday morning serials, these filmic adventures were designed to end on a cliffhanger so you’d come back to your local movie theater next week and pay your dime or fifteen cents to see what happened next.
In our last episode the hero was sapped with a blackjack and put in the car, usually a coupe, knocked out. A brick was jammed against the accelerator pedal and the car was sent racing toward the burning barn and crashed into the flames, exploding. Oh my. But when we returned to the harrowing event next Saturday, our point-of-view is from inside the car. The hero shakes himself awake and tumbles out of the driver’s door seconds before the car roars into the fire and goes up like a Roman candle.
If the director shooting these Poverty Row entertainments was thinking ahead, he might have angled their camera in such a way as to make it plausible the hero dived out of the car. Though often given these episodes were not big on minor details of continuity, the previous episode could have shown the car from the driver’s side with our hero still knocked inside as it plowed into the blazing barn. So when exactly did he rouse himself and get out?
But this writing yourself into a corner is not just a province of the past. Being a fan of Lost and Desperate Housewives, I’ve long noted various plot threads have been dropped or skipped over as storylines got too convoluted and the writers got themselves boxed in. Housewives jumped forward in time five years to accelerate certain plot points and not have to follow several character arcs that would bogged down the series.
Mindful of TiVos and DVRs, print nonetheless demands an adherence to continuity, so it was my task to reconcile and smooth out segments of the serialized Underbelly versus the text version. I was also able to expand the story some and provide a more satisfying ending to this mystery involving my semi-homeless Vietnam vet, Magrady. The past plays an important part in my guy’s make-up as he’s haunted not only by deeds done in the war, but the repercussions of that time has affected him today. His backstory included spiraling out of control, abusing booze and drugs, and this in turn cost him his family. In this tweaked version of The Underbelly, Magrady better reconciles those failures and achieves a quiet redemption. I hope you’ll give the hardcopy a read when this bad rascal rolls out in July—three years to the date when it first ran.
In the era when Saturday morning serials flourished, there used to be another form of cheap entertainment for a dime, the pulp magazine. The pulps, so-called for the cheap paper (where you could literally see flecks of wood in the pages now and then) they were printed on, were square bound magazines where you could read a novel length, as they said then, story of some 50-70,000 words of The Shadow or Doc Savage (the number one and two, respectively, bestselling titles of their day), and backup short stories of other blood curdling adventures.
Edgar Rice Burroughs first introduced Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars in the pulps. Conan the Barbarian first slew and screwed his way across a mythical ancient world in Weird Tales. Ex-Pinkerton detective Samuel Dashiell Hammett first penned the short stories of his agency private eye, the unnamed Continental Operative, in the pulps, most notable in the pages of Black Mask magazine. Also in that monthly, a middle-aged hard-drinking former oil company executive named Raymond Chandler wrote out short stories like “I’ll Be Waiting.” These would turn out to be character and plot ideas for what would become his iconic private eye, Philip Marlowe, developed in the long form of Chandler’s novel. It’s alleged Upton Sinclair was able to dictate as much as 8,000 words a day as a pulpateer.
Several of these pulp characters would be realized on radio and a few like the Shadow (actually a character called The Shadow introduced pulp magazine publisher Street and Smith’s Detective Story Hour, became a star of his own magazine, then back to radio in his own stories) and Secret Agent X-9 from the comic strips (written for a time by Dashiell Hammett) had life in episodic Saturday morning serials of their own. Later, some of these characters like the Green Lama, who has to be the world’s first Buddhist super-hero, would get their own comic book titles.
Possibly a reflection of the Great Recession we’re in now (people in search of inexpensive forms of escapism) but as pulp thrived in the Great Depression, it’s making something of a comeback in this time period. DC Comics kicked off their First Wave umbrella in which, in the words of series architect writer Brian Azzarello, is a kind of semi-retro mash-up period where Tommy guns, jet planes, blimps and Ferraris exist side-by-side. In the First Wave world Batman (who was based partly on The Shadow) is just starting out and is a secretive, masked avenger and Doc Savage is a public hero.
Moonstone Comics is also readying its Return of the Originals line of revived pulp characters and yours truly is getting a crack at a character called Operator 5. At the height of the Depression, as war clouds darkened Europe and concerns at home about foreign saboteurs blossomed, Popular Publications in-house editors came up with secret agent Jimmy Christopher, Operator 5 of the American Intelligence Service. Like James Bond, he faced outlandish villains and situations like The Army of the Dead and Invasion of the Crimson Death Cult; his chief was only known by his code designation, Z-7 akin to M in the Bond books; and Christopher was a martial artist versed in ju-jitsu and used gadgets like exploding fountain pens and, naturally, was a crack shot. Like Jack Bauer, Operator 5 faced down threats that shook the very core of the United States. In the first issue, April 1934, the illustration on the cover shows a hat-wearing Jimmy Christopher looming over a White House being blown up in the Masked Invasion. In this initial outing, Operator 5 battles evildoers who have a machine that turns off electrical machinery. Yeegads!
The cool thing about writing characters set in the ’30s is capturing the feel of the stories then but also being able to infuse modern sensibilities into the stories. My first tale is about Christopher infiltrating an American bund, a neo-nazi organization planning to assassinate a black leader a la Marcus Garvey, heading a back to Africa movement. Ah, but why would these fascists want to kill a chap doing what they want?
Stay tuned, gentle readers, for that story while I fret again about what to write next and how to keep them coming back for more.
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your expose of serial dramas jumping forward in time to avoid long, cumbersome entanglements was really interesting.
i thought it would be fun to do a serial. but it is HAAARRRD.
2010-05-12 by florence