what is dime store novel?
jose...@gmail.com
that means. Could someone tell me?
I quote the paragraph below:
"Spinning the sort of story once found in dime store novels, the police
said in Taipei that a middle-aged man had carried out the shooting on
March 19 because he was depressed about difficulties in selling a
house...."
Also, is the author trying to imply the whole plot is ridiculous?
joseph
CyberCypher
> I read this in NYTimes. As a non native speaker, I'm not very sure
> what that means. Could someone tell me?
>
> I quote the paragraph below:
>
> "Spinning the sort of story once found in dime store novels, the
> police said in Taipei that a middle-aged man had carried out the
> shooting on March 19 because he was depressed about difficulties
> in selling a house...."
Dime-store novels were cheap novels turned out by people who were not
very good writers. But they were cheap to buy and heavy on amazing
twists of plot, something like the current political situation in
Taiwan at the moment --- who'd ahtought that Lee Deng-Hui would
repudiate Chen Shuei-Bian for meeting with James Soong to try to ease
political conflict? And who'd athought that Chen and Soong would ever
shake hands? And what's gonna happen in the DPP now that so many
hard-line secessionists (with whom I ultimately sympathize) are
pissed at Chenfor meeting with Soong? And what's gonna happen with
the KMT-PFP merger now that Soong has cozied up to the ruling party?
And when with Lien Chan finally give up the idea that he could ever
become president of Taiwan? Vincent Chiew bowed out of politics just
a week or two ago, and it's time for Lien to do the same.
Well, it's just an unbelievable story, but it'll keep one occupied
from Ping-Tung to Kee-Lung, and then one will want to throw the book
away and read something more believable.
> Also, is the author trying to imply the whole plot is ridiculous?
Yep. The China Post story said that the man's wife said that he hated
Chen and wanted to kill him. Then there are the three suicide notes
that the wife allegedly burned but none of which had contained any
comment about the Chen/Lu shooting. And the fact that the guy drowned
himself less than two weeks after the shooting. It's all too
convenient and seems to be just a story that the police have invented
to satisfy the public or the KMT.
Then,too, there is today's story in the Taipei times that says in
part:
"Meanwhile, pan-blue camp legislators, including People First Party
(PFP) Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安) and PFP caucus whip Liu Wen-hsiung (劉文
雄), yesterday said Chen Yi-hsiung might have been murdered.
"They said police had failed to find the most important evidence -- the gun and bullets used
in the shooting -- and alleged that police were wrapping up the investigation prematurely."
The plot thickens and sickens.
--
Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor
For email, replace numbers with English alphabet.
'Henry Kissinger once justified U.S. support for the Pinochet coup in
Chile by saying "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a
country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own
people."' Time Magazine article http://tinyurl.com/4jtf8
keke
very well:)
so is there any difference between a pulp fiction and a dime store
novel? I read somewhere before that pulp fiction is cheap novel too.
einde. ocallaghan
as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell hammett started as pulp fiction writers.
Regards, Einde O'Callaghan
CyberCypher
> wow, thanks a lot. You seem to know the political situation in Taiwan
> very well:)
I've been here for the past 8.5 years. It's my home. My wife and son
are Taiwanese. I liked the politics here much better back in 1996 when
I first arrived.
> so is there any difference between a pulp fiction and a dime store
> novel? I read somewhere before that pulp fiction is cheap novel too.
>
--
credoquaabsurdum
interpretation, but I remember hearing something about this back in
school.
"Pulp fiction" and "dime store novels" are, more or less, supposed to
be the same thing. It had to do with the kind of paper that these
things were published on. "Pulp fiction" meant that the book was
printed on paper processed from pulp, 100% cheap wood by-products with
a high acid content. Paper like that quickly falls to pieces, even
under the best of conditions. Better books were published on a rag and
wood pulp mix, which had a lower acid content, was softer and far more
durable. The techniques necessary for mass-producing this kind of paper
did not come into widespread use until just before the Great Depression
in the States.
"Pulp fiction" was used, by the makers of rag paper and the printers of
higher-quality books, as a term of derision. The cheap-book market
expanded so quickly that certain writers began to write exclusively for
it, and any book with a lurid, transparent plot that did not bill
itself as the product of literary genius was called "pulp fiction."
Three major genres: mystery whodunnit novels, adventure romances and
teenage adventure stories were essentially created by the advent of
these cheap books, despite having their roots in far earlier stories
(Poe wrote the first detective story, it is believed; novels really
comes from Middle Age romances).
A "dime-store novel" is supposed to be quintessential pulp fiction, as
it was sold in what was that era's "99 cent store." At a time when
English literary studies was really beginning to take off and the
standard university course was being replaced with various electives
system, dime store novels were a kind of entertainment that was barely
above minstel and vaudeville shows. There was something scandalous
about them.
As has been pointed out in this thread, however, some of the writer for
the pulp fiction market, who put out dime-store novels like _The
Maltese Falcon_, are now regarded quite differently in contemporary
literary studies.
einde. ocallaghan
if they have the same origin. "Dime-store novel" has negative
connotations while "pulp fiction" has the connotation that it's much
better than you might think.
Regards, Einde O'Callaghan
John Ramsay
NY Times is confused. The proper term is 'dime novel'
because they sold for a dime/10 cents, not because they
were sold at a dime store.
Brit equivalent is 'the penny dreadful'.
A web search for either will get you a ton of information.
credoquaabsurdum
For the British, well, you have to go to the OED online to get a
slightly better, although still incomplete look at the situation in
American English. Y'all are no doubt aware that UK sources regarding
the English language tend to be a little bit on the superfluous side
when researching specifically American items. Unfortunately, when
Canadians go a-researchin', they typically go UK.
Canada...land of beans and franks...
I may get a spanking, but:
Voila!
---
b. attrib. Costing a dime; as in dime novel, applied especially to a
cheap sensational novel: cf. penny dreadful, shilling shocker; hence
dime-novelish adj., dime-novelist. dime-store U.S., a shop in which the
maximum price was originally a dime; also attrib. or as adj., spec.
designating a cheap and inferior article; cf. five-and-ten (cent store)
(FIVE C. 2).
1859 (title) Beadle's dime song book. 1860 (title) Beadle's dime book
of dreams..compiled from the most accredited sources for the 'Dime
series'. 1861 Vanity Fair 26 Jan. 38/2, I invested in the dime
editions of startling narratives. 1864 N. Amer. Rev. July 304 A Dime
Novel is issued each month. 1865 A. H. STEPHENS Diary (1910) 424 A
little primer-looking sort of a child's book. It was a dime novel. 1879
H. GEORGE Progr. & Pov. X. ii. (1881) 443 The boy who reads dime novels
wants to be a pirate. 1879 Amer. Punch Apr. 40/1 Written to order by
the hundred, by a Dime novelist in New York. 1882 Century Mag. XXV.
212/1 You are as bad as a dime novel. 1887 Scribner's Mag. July 120/1
It was a trifle boyish, and 'dime-novelish'. 1892 Daily News 29
Mar. 2/5 The nuisance of 'dime shows' as they are called in
America. 1914 R. HERRICK Clark's Field 7 The facts are not all
dime-novelish, but very human and significant. 1928 WESEEN Crowell's
Dict. Eng. Gram. 188 Dime store, colloquial name for a store that
specializes in articles selling for ten cents. The five and ten is a
variant. 1931 Kansas City Star 23 Oct., A dime store in Emporia. 1938
Newsweek 31 Jan. 36/1 'Best buy' was a dime-store product, which
cost 5 cents a gram. 1942 BERREY & VAN DEN BARK Amer. Thes. Slang
§21/14 Cheap; paltry,..dime-store.
---
So, OED recognizes both "dime novel" and "dime store," but does not
include "dime store novel." Citations up until 1942. Go figure. And all
this crap for what is pretty much purely an American phenomenon. Every
Americans and even Canadian Bryan Adams knows what a five-and-dime is!
We are also told that a dime novel is a penny dreadful, which is, as we
shall shortly see, that quintessentially oversmug, British little bit
off regarding our language.
Google lists 241,000 hits on "dime novel" and 111,000 on "dime store
novel," which reinforces my belief that it is not savvy ELT advice to
tell non-native speakers to, "Go check it out on the web, you can look
it up real good there."
Let's go to LION (Literature On-Line)
DIME NOVELS AND PENNY DREADFULS
from Encyclopedia of the Novel.
Schellinger, Paul (ed.); Hudson, Christopher; Rijsberman, Marijke (asst
eds).
Chicago; London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. 2 vols.
Copyright © 1998 Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
DIME NOVELS AND PENNY DREADFULS
[PENNY DREADFUL]
Dime novels and penny dreadfuls are generic terms for paper-bound
publications with a sensational content. The terms originated in the
United States and Great Britain, respectively, in the 19th century,
although the British form preceded the American. Dime novel is derived
from a specific series of publications, Beadle's Dime Novels, which
began publication in the United States in 1860; penny dreadful (which
designation first appeared in print in John Camden Hotten's Slang
Dictionary in 1874) is a pejorative term applied broadly, and often
inaccurately, to several classes of publications dating to the 1830s.
The term penny dreadful is often applied not only to the Gothic or
outlaw-hero penny-a-part novels of the 1830s and 1840s but also to the
subsequent stories published for the juvenile market in the 1850s, as
well as to the penny magazines and weekly boys' papers of the 1860s. It
also includes the published plagiarisms of the novels of Charles
Dickens.
Chronologically, the British penny dreadful preceded the American dime
novel by about 30 years, although the two forms shared certain traits.
The most obvious similarities were the content (lurid, sensational
stories that have come to represent national myths) and the manner of
publication. The early penny dreadful was often one long episodic story
presented in many parts, each part costing only one penny. Each part
was eight pages of double-column print, in which the story might break
off in mid-sentence at the bottom of page eight only to resume on the
first page of the next part (which would be available at the newsdealer
the following week). No attempt was made to account for what had come
before. The dime novel was a unit in a sequence of many stories, issued
on a regular basis, that revolved around a single character or
consistent theme, each story costing as little as ten cents.
The earliest penny dreadfuls were published by Edward Lloyd of London,
and the form took recognizable shape with his Lives of the Most
Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, etc., published in 60 parts in 1836.
The outlaw as hero was a major figure in these early stories and was
often loosely based on an 18th-century historic figure such as Dick
Turpin, Jack Sheppard, or Claude Duval. The long series of Robin Hood
stories begun by Pierce Egan Jr. belong to this category as well.
The honor of being the most infamous of penny dreadfuls is shared by
two stories, Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood (1847), which
influenced Bram Stoker in his writing of Dracula (1897), and the
legendary story of Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber, which may be found in
different versions beginning in 1846. The author of the first is
generally thought to be James Malcolm Rymer, while the second may be
the work of Thomas Peckett Prest.
Edward Lloyd was only one of many publishers of penny dreadfuls. His
colleagues and rivals in this enterprise included G.W.M. Reynolds, John
Dicks, George Vickers, George Purkiss, and W.M. Clarke. In the 1860s
the field was joined by Edward J. Brett, publisher of Boys of England,
which contained Bracebridge Hemyng's early stories of Jack Harkaway.
Brett's publications, advertised as antidotes to the previous
generation of lurid stories, borrowed many of the same themes. The
effective campaign waged against the penny dreadful by the Religious
Tract Society and the The Boys' Own Paper (1879) was followed by the
"half-penny papers" of Harmsworth Publications, such as the Union Jack.
By the 1890s the detective stories of Sexton Blake outsold the old
dreadfuls and soon were joined in popularity by the school stories
written by Charles Hamilton under such pen names as Martin Clifford and
Frank Richards.
The original dime novel was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White
Hunter, by Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Published by Irwin P. Beadle of New
York in June 1860, it was the first of a long series of stories about
the American frontier. It was followed by other stories based on
American history that some critics feel molded the popular notion of
the American Revolution and promoted the American belief in rugged
individualism.
By the 1880s the frontier hero, modeled on James Fenimore Cooper's
Leatherstocking tales or on historic figures such as Kit Carson, Davy
Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Buffalo Bill, was in competition with the
urban heroes, detectives like Old Sleuth, Old King Brady, Old Cap.
Collier, and Nick Carter. Stories of bandits such as Jesse James were
as popular in the United States as the stories of highwaymen had been
in England. Other genres had their followers: science fiction with
Frank Reade or school and sports stories featuring Frank Merriwell. As
had happened in England with the penny dreadfuls, the United States
audience for dime novels grew beyond adults. As in England, the writers
were less well known than their heroes and their imaginary worlds.
After 1915, new forms of mass entertainment, the motion picture and the
pulp magazine, replaced the dime novel. Of the five major publishers,
Beadle and Adams, George Munro, Norman L. Munro, Frank Tousey, and
Street and Smith, only the latter survived by adapting to new tastes.
The way in which the dime novel and the penny dreadful contribute to an
understanding of the development of the novel lies not in any literary
merit but in the development of marketing, in popular concepts about
the Wild West or the urban sleath, that each kept before the reader,
and in the response that each made to public demand. A number of
factors came together at the right time to make the dime novel and
penny dreadful successful business ventures for their publishers: the
growing literacy in each nation; the invention of the rotary steam
printing press; the development of paper-making methods that replaced
rag-content paper with paper made from wood pulp; and, finally, the
creation of new means of large-scale distribution. In the United States
this was achieved via the American News Company, in Great Britain by
the Newsagents' Publishing Company.
J. Randolph Cox
Now, let's take a look at a Florida newspaper
http://www.gainesvilleregister.com/articles/2004/11/16/news/news2.txt
>From Fu Manchu to Conan the Barbarian
By JENNIFER SICKING, Register Staff Writer
In a speech that often made the listeners fill the room with laughter,
Rose-Mary Rumbley spoke about dime novels, frontier literature and
added three "rest of the story"- type surprises during the Friends of
the Library meeting.
Rumbley, an author of three books and the former head of the drama
department at Dallas Baptist University, spoke before an audience that
filled a banquet room Monday at the Roadhouse Restaurant in Lindsay.
"I thought it was absolutely magnificent," Sylvia Lyons said afterward.
"It would encourage people to want to read."
In beginning her talk she repeated the lines from a song in the musical
"Music Man" in which he enumerates the signs of trouble, including
"finding in the corn crib a dime novel." Dime novels were filled with
adventure and romance, of which many thought ill of, Rumbley said.
"Many people thought it was evil to leave reality," she said, and then
mentioned a more modern version of escapism with the books about child
wizard, Harry Potter.
"I don't think it bothered my generation running down the corn field
with Dorothy and meeting the Tin Man," she added to general laughter.
Reading wasn't only for education, she said, but also was entertainment
for people who lived during a time without electricity, radios,
televisions and movies.
"All they could do was read," she said.
Through her speech, she traced the history of printing in America with
the first printing press landing on the shores of Plymouth in 1639.
Bibles and pamphlets about freedom were the first items printed. Much
later would come beginning reader books that focused on phonics, the
Bible and Shakespeare.
"That's why the early Americans were so smart," she said. "They read
the Bible and Shakespeare."
Her generation, she said, learned to read a different sort of book,
which she then acted out.
"See Jane. See. See. See," she said while miming flipping pages.
>From morality stories published by a Parson Weems in Saint Louis,
including the infamous one of a George Washington cutting down a cherry
tree, eventually the public turned to dime novels, which were first
printed in the 1880s after the successful publishing of a dime
songbook.
The dime store novelists were a much different species of writer than
Mark Twain, James Fenimoore Cooper and O. Henry, she said. Those men
lived in the west.
"They wrote westerns and never left New York," Rumbley said of the dime
store novelists.
Reoccurring themes could be traced throughout the dime store novels.
"One of their favorite stories was about the little white girl captured
by the Indians," she said.
The dime novelists also wrote about the frontiersmen such as Davy
Crockett and Daniel Boone, the romantic figure of the cowboy and the
outlaw.
She then told the story of one western, in which John Wayne later
starred in the movie, about a cowboy name Lassiter. In the movie,
Lassiter scoops up the girl in his arms and rides away.
"That's pure escapism," she said. "Has anyone in here ever been scooped
up?"
>From the demise of the dime store novel, rose the Harlequin romance
books and the fantasy books of today, she said.
As for the surprises, the stories had to do with sons that defied their
fathers' expectations and wrote with vivid imaginations about places
they had never seen. Each vignette assumed a "rest of the story" style.
For her first surprise, she told of a man named Ward who declined to
follow his father into the banking business.
"He developed the story of an evil Chinese doctor who hung out in an
opium den," she said.
The writer, who never left London, took the name of Sax Rohmer and
developed the character of Dr. Fu Manchu.
The second story centered upon a man who never left Chicago until later
in his life and turned down joining his father's business. Even though
he never visited London, met royalty, traveled on the Atlantic,
traveled in Africa or saw an ape, he wrote stories that proved
successful with readers and later with movie goers.
After a couple of nobility died -- the mother only after crawling
ashore and giving birth -- from a shipwreck, an ape suffering from
empty nest syndrome found the recently orphaned baby boy, which she
took and raised, Rumbley said. When he was older that boy set out to
find himself.
"He saw a book and taught himself to read. 'Look Jane. Look. Look.
Look.'," she said. "He realized he could make noises others couldn't.
He realized he wasn't an ape, he was Tarzan."
The third story involved an ugly, grumpy old maid and a grumpy doctor
who lived in Cross Plains, near Abilene. She said if the story sounded
harsh it was because everything was true.
"They hated each other, but they must have loved once," Rumbley said.
"She gave birth."
That birth was to a boy named Robert E. Howard.
"She loved him, loved him, loved and made him weird," Rumbley said
about the affection the mother had for the son.
As an adult the son, whom Rumbley described as wimpy, created "big
hunks" who lived in countries and on planets that didn't exist. Those
stories , some of which were printed in a serialized format, he sold to
magazines of the weird.
Yet at age 30, Howard killed himself when he was told his mother would
not recover from a coma and had only hours to live. It would only be
later the world would know about Howard. Hollywood discovered Howard's
worlds with their main character of Conan and launched Arnold
Schwarzenegger's career.
"My Sunday school teacher was right. One person can change the world,"
Rumbley said. "This wimp made the governor of California and maybe the
president (referring to the talk of an amendment that would allow
Schwarzenegger to run for president)."
During the short business portion of the meeting, Lyons announced the
formation of a book discussion group. The organizational meeting is set
to begin at 1 p.m. Dec. 8 at the Cooke County Library. A meeting to
discuss broadening the Friends of the Library group will take place
beginning at 2 p.m.
Lyons also was elected president, while Sandra Burrow was elected vice
president. Janis Cravens was selected to fill the secretary position
and Marge Priest was chosen as treasurer.
And now the University of Virginia
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG00/3on1/cowboy/lit.html
Not any one writer or time period defined the American cowboy of
1920s literature. Rather, the cowboy hero of 1920s literature
represented both a deviation from the traditional dime store novel
hero's of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as well as an
illustration of their influences. According to Henry Nash Smith the
hero's and westerns depicted in dime novels " lead almost in a straight
line from the Beadle to the Westerns" (Yates, 9). According to Lon
Taylor's "The American Cowboy: An American Myth Examined," the 1902
release of Owen Wister's The Virginian marked the final stage in the
evolution of the cowboy from western hero to national icon and
entertainer.
Owen Wister was a Philadelphia-born aristocrat and Harvard graduate who
fell in love with the west during a hunting trip to Montana. His novel,
The Virginian was the story of a young cowboy and his love for a
eastern school teacher. The story follows the protagonist as he
attempts to reconcile his sense of honor and justice with his loves
sense of legal and moral right. Critics described The Virginian as a
symbolic attept to unite the ordered society of the east with the sense
of freedom that penetrated and defined the western region. The
Virginian marked a turning point in the development of the cowboy as a
national hero, it also illustrated the final step in the creation of
the romantic cowboy:
The Virginian firmly established the stereotyped cowboy as young,
handsome, courageous, soft-spoken (who can ever forget, "When you call
me that, smile?"), independent, and holding a high sense of honor. It
also established him as irrevocably Anglo-Saxon--there is not a black
or a Mexican in the entire book. As depicted by Mr. Wister, he is a
creature of such physical beauty, such mental vigor, such moral
attitude, such exectutive equipment, and such universal genius as ought
to serve as a beacon or headlight for the nations, and, indeed, an
example for the human race. (Taylor, 71)
The cowboy depicted by Wister was an immensely popular figure and his
book was an instant success:
It sold 50,000 copies in the first two months, and Wister was deluged
with letters from westerners who complimented him on the accuracy of
his description, often adding that they had known The Virginian.
(Taylor, 72)
The success of The Virginian demonstrated that American's loved cowboys
whether they were real or artificial and through his success Wister
compelled many writers of the time to write literature based on the
cowboy experience. The cowboy was no longer merely a westerner--his
traits as defined by The Virginian illustrated the universal nature of
the cowboy. The qualities that characterized the cowboy as a
hero--honor, valor, inteligence, and independence--were clearly
national qualities not relegated to a specific area of the country.
In conclusion, the cowboy as a hero of the 1920s both represented the
historical interpretations of the cowboy depicted in dime store novels
and redefined the western cowboy along more universal lines--the
western cowboy became the American cowboy. This transition was in part
made possible by Wister's The Virginian, which set the stage for an
insurgence of western literature and the creation of the American
Cowboy not only as a hero, but as a icon as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bibliography
Taylor, Lonn and Maar, Ingrid. The American Cowboy. New York: Harper
and Row, 1983
Yates, Norris Wilson. Gender and Genre: An Introduction to Women
Writers of Formula Westerns, 1900-1950. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1995.
Looks good right? OK, "dime store novel" IS used, but "dime novel" is
more accepted. As an American, however, I KNEW that something was
strange here. I mean, I think "dime-store novel" and I think TRASH. I
think "dime novel" and I think genre. After all, I remember
five-and-dimes!
http://www.svcn.com/archives/wgresident/11.10.99/remember-when-9945.html
Novel Ideas: The 1940s and '50s were the golden age of pulp fiction.
Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
Remember When
The thrills of pulp fiction
By Cookie Curci-Wright
Fifty years ago, you couldn't walk into a local soda shop, grocery
store or cigar shop without bumping into a wire rack filled with pulp
fiction.
These paperback novels featured daring detectives, seductive women and
dastardly villains--all part of the 1940s and the '50s pulp fiction
allure.
I remember well those gaudy-covered books, magazines and comics that
decorated the walls and filled the wire racks of our local creamery. It
was our habit, back then, among my teenage pals, to take a book from
these shelves and read its most exciting passages while we sipped our
sodas. When we finished, we returned the book to the rack. One day, the
store owner posted a large sign over the book rack. It read: THIS IS
NOT A LIBRARY--ANY BOOKS TAKEN TO THE COUNTER WILL BE CHARGED TO THE
CUSTOMER. From that point on, our reading endeavors steadily declined.
It was in the pages of tawdry paperback novels that many teenagers
learned about romance and the facts of life. Young girls kept their
secret copies of Kathleen Windsor's erotic bestseller Forever Amber
hidden under their pillows; boys concealed their covert copies of Dr.
Kinsey's morals-shaking Sexual Behavior In the Human Male stashed under
their mattresses. Meanwhile, mom and dad were learning how to rear
their young by reading the revolutionary new child-guidance manual,
Common Sense Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock. (Decades later, the
author would recant his theory.) Also hot reading on the paperback
reader's list was D.H. Lawrence's story of illicit romance, Lady
Chatterley's Lover, and Vladimir Nabokov's scandalously sexy Lolita.
While most of America was reading spicy, novels many others were
enthralled by the nonfiction bestseller The Search for Bridey Murphy.
This book, by Morey Bernstein, set off a national obsession with
reincarnation in the mid 1950s. The book later fell from grace when the
story was debunked.
But of all the mind-stirring, life-changing novels of the decade, Grace
Metalious's Peyton Place had the greatest impact on a blossoming
generation. Its popularity launched a movie and a TV series in the late
'50s, but more than that, the paperback version would become the
hottest and most clandestinely read book in teenage America.
During the 1940s, America had at least 50 book clubs selling specialty
volumes to suit all tastes. Pocket-sized books rose meteorically in
popularity. It was pulp fiction's heyday and the height in mail-order
book sales. The Book of the Month Club annually distributed thousands
of titles.
The decade of the 1940s opened with the appearance of the first
inexpensive paperback reprint of a hardcover bestseller; swift-moving
thrillers that touched and thrilled readers' imaginations. Fading
romance novels and detective stories graced the shelves at our corner
market, the 5&10 store and soda shop--all new locations for these "dime
novels" that cost a quarter.
WWII played an important part in the growing popularity of pulp
fiction. USO clubs and military libraries offered servicemen a
well-stocked supply of paperbacks and they soon acquired the habit of
reaching for a book to pass the time.
Dashiel Hammet's lively detective novels were among the most-read of
the decade's paperbacks. His fast-paced, realistic detective classics
spawned a series of pulp-fiction detectives. Hammet's popular novels
gave birth to two of Hollywood's most enduring private eyes: Sam Spade
and Nick Charles. His characters epitomized the hard-boiled detective,
who, despite a dark and sinister lifestyle, still adhered to a personal
code of ethics. The story's characters, ambiance and motivation were
more important to readers than the solving of the crime.
Hammet's crime sleuths, better known as "gumshoes" and "private dicks,"
and Mickey Spillane's private eye, Mike Hammer, became the archetypes
for the era's pulp-fiction detectives.
Pulp fiction, so named for the low quality of paper the books were
printed on, was riding a crest of popularity in the late '40s. One of
my personal favorites from the decade was a pulp magazine called Weird
Tales. This scary bit of fiction featured a young writer by the name of
Ray Bradbury, who later became one of America's foremost science
fiction writers. Like many magazines of this genre, it caused me many a
sleepless night. Typical of these stories was one called "The Final
Hour," which appeared in the January 1947 issue. The story is about a
terminally ill author who offers his soul to Satan in exchange for
seven more years of life so he can finish a monumental book. At the end
of the seven years, Satan comes to collect his due. But he goes away
thwarted when he discovers that the man's soul is already gone--the
author literally poured his heart and soul into his book!
Dime store novels took center stage in our post-war America, while
television, the slayer of the written word, sat patiently waiting in
the wings to make its grand debut.
VERDICT: Authors very familiar with American pop culture might use to
use "dime store novel" as a more modern, pejorative term when referring
to something cheap, tawdry or shocking, "dime novel" when referring to
the prewar genre or postwar pulp fiction in either positive or neutral
contexts. "Pulp fiction" is NOT, in modern use, a pejorative term,
exactly as described earlier in this thread.
So who is this New York Times reporter? Is he just some illiterate
idiot they scraped up off the sidewalk and gave a job to yesterday?
http://www.bookbrowse.com/dyn_/author/authorID/817.htm
Keith Bradsher - Biography
Books by Keith Bradsher
Keith Bradsher was the Detroit bureau chief of The New York Times from
1996 to 2001. He won the George Polk Award and was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize. A Times reporter since 1989, he is currently the
paper's Hong Kong bureau chief.
This biography was last updated in Oct 2002. Unless otherwise stated it
was provided by the author's publisher or publicist.
Credo, quoi absurdum.
Habia Khet
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