Black Gate

My buddy Frank Schildiner is a prolific New Pulpster who wrote about Max Allen Collins in the first run of A (Black) Gat in the Hand. I immediately turned back to him and he’s back again for round two with a look at the bad guys of pulp. 

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

  “Bring on the Bad Guys…Pulp Edition”

“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“There’s something about America’s sweetheart and America’s bad boy. That juxtaposition is what everyone desires.” – Machine Gun Kelly

Bad guy, villain, evildoer, crook, criminal, and gangster. Fiction has a love affair with these characters ranging from low-level sneak thieves to wizards intent on destroying all life on Earth. In many cases, the villain is the driving force behind the tale. Where would fiction be without Lady MacBeth, Grendel’s Mother, Long John Silver, or Count Dracula?

Though the villain is often the impetus, they rarely hold the place of protagonist in novels until recent times. A few famous characters did achieve notoriety, influencing fiction to this day.

The first true villain-centered, serialized fiction was probably Paul Féval’s series Les Habits Noirs. The eleven novels reveal a worldwide criminal conspiracy led by the evil, manipulative, and possibly immortal, Colonel Bozzo-Corona. The Colonel, and his organization the Black Coats, battled the forces of good as well as each other in tales which thrilled readers for thirty-one years.

…

Read More Read More

Science fiction writers from Doc Smith to Robert Heinlein had their lone inventors hop into spaceships they built in their back yards. NASA had no such luxury. Space was the absolute unknown in the 1950s. A few rockets and satellites had poked their noses into the vacuum, but piloted craft were on the horizon and next to nothing was understood about how the rigors of space would affect human bodies. NASA had to worry about a million small details, using thousands of engineers at dozens of companies.

The pressure to learn grew more urgent in the early 1960s as the Americans prepped for a moon voyage. Project Gemini followed the just-get-‘em-in-space Mercury with the specific goal to understand space and “To demonstrate endurance of humans and equipment in spaceflight for extended periods, at least eight days required for a Moon landing, to a maximum of two weeks.” That put them into a quandary. The conditions of space couldn’t truly be duplicated here on Earth and starting tests on astronauts after they got to space defeated the whole notion of preparation.

Some bright – and at this distance unknown – engineer at NASA had the lightbulb idea: robot astronauts.

…

Read More Read More

This week, I got fellow Sherlock Holmes friend Andrew Salmon to hold forth on hardboiled pulp. You’d be surprised how many Holmes fans are also pulpsters. Andrew is a leading light in the New Pulp movement (along with some other Black Gate guest posters, like Frank Schildiner, Will Murray and Duane Spurlock – who wrote last week’s post). Today, he takes us international, so read on!

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

A FRIEND IN TEED – The Lost World of Montreal Noir

Thoughts of hardboiled fiction’s history conjure Mike Hammer’s New York or the sunny California of Sam Spade and Lew Archer. But the rich tradition of the genre along with Noir has expanded immensely, yielding rich gold mines in Berlin Noir and Dublin Noir to name two of many.

And yet there is a closer example of the universality of mean streets all over the world laid out in grimy exuberance in a hardboiled tale well told – and it is not a recent offshoot. I’m talking about the little known, until recently, forgotten hardboiled Canadian noir of the 1950s.

These were paperbacks to be found on spinner racks on both sides of the border. Issued by small printing houses in small print runs for the much smaller population of Canada, the pulp yarns churned out by a host of writers was long forgotten and scarce hardly sums up their availability. They aren’t collectible offerings from big names in publishing. The books came and went to molder in attics, landfills and to find second use helping to start fires on cold Canadian nights. Lost to time.

Until Ricochet Books, an arm of Vehicule Publishing, decided to pick up the gauntlet laid down by Hard Case Crime Books (among others) and began hunting up these lost gems. The books are widely available now in new editions with the old, classic covers and I urge you to look them up.

For the sake of this piece, however, I’d like to focus on a trio of novels that best fit the hardboiled school. Author Charles Ross Graham, writing as David Montrose, produced three Russell Teed novels between 1950 and 1953. Teed’s a former reporter turned private eye and in typically understated Canadian fashion works insurance claims and other non-violent crimes.

That is until the first book, The Crime on Cote Des Neiges (1951), which has him thrown into the investigation of a bootlegger’s murder. The police are convinced the widow is the guilty party and Teed has to get her out from under before it’s too late. What follows is an engaging mystery the hard drinking Teed weaves his way through amidst an entertaining presentation of Montreal when it was the Sin City of the North.

…

Read More Read More