Pulp Fiction, Canada-style By Jeet Heer National Post (March 3, 2004) Old pulp magazines are now treasured by collectors because they conjure up the same atmosphere of sleazy glamour made famous by film noir: a world of rough-neck heroes and tough-talking dames, where flashes of silk nylon can be seen amid smoke issuing from cigarettes and revolvers. Yet in their time, the pulps were scorned by the arbiters of good taste. “On the underside of our society, there are those who have no real stake at all in respectable culture,” warned critic Robert Warshow in 1946.”These are readers of pulp magazines and comic books, potential book-burners, unhappy patrons of astrologers and communicants of lunatic sects, the hopelessly alienated and outclassed who can enjoy perhaps not even Andy Hardy but only Bela Lugosi, not even the Reader’s Digest but only True Detective”. Living in a world where the serial killer movies induce yawns and forensic crime-solving is a nightly TV ritual, it is almost impossible to imagine a time in which pulp magazines produced the frisson of dangerous reading. Fortunately, historians Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo help recover the cultural significance of this once-despised and now half-forgotten literary medium. In their sprightly new book True Crime, True North: The Golden Age of Canadian Pulp Magazines, Strange and Loo recapture the tone and texture of the old pulps and raise anew the question of why they were so disreputable. Pulp magazines flourished throughout the early 20th century and came in all different genres: romance, westerns, science-fiction, detective stories. Rather than survey the whole of this large literary terrain, Strange and Loo wisely focus on a particular genre: the Canadian “true crime” magazines that mushroomed during the 1940s. Like so much of Canadian culture, these magazines were as much a product of government edict as consumer demand. In 1940, fearing that wartime spending could throw Canada’s balance of trade with the United States off kilter, our Federal government passed a law banning the importation of nonessential goods, including chocolate, champagne and magazines featuring “detective, sex, western and alleged true or confession stories.” This ban on American pulp created an opening for Canadian entrepreneurs, notably Al Valentine as well as Lou and Moe Ruby. These were barrel-scraping publishers who had previously specialized in tabloids and girlie magazine. Lou and Moe Ruby were particularly prone to legal trouble, more than once nicked by the police for producing allegedly obscene material. (There is an interesting tidbit that Strange and Loo don’t mention: Moe Ruby would have a son that would see the courtroom from a different vantage point: the famed defense lawyer Clayton Ruby). Whatever legal difficulties these publishers had, they published “true crime” magazines that were filled with reverence for the law and its agents. On the outside these pulp magazines seemed wild and untamed, with sultry women surrounded by an ambience of incipient violence. Yet the stories between these lurid covers were fundamentally conservative: the standard narrative was a police procedural showing the noble forces of law and order relentlessly and successfully bringing felons to justice. To understand Canadian pulp magazines we have to clear our mind of American clichés. The classic U.S. hard-boiled detective story, as pioneered by writers like Dashiell Hammett, was an urban tale featuring as hero a lone-wolf private detective, usually struggling against a corrupt social system where gangsters and cops worked hand in hand. The Canadian “true crime” pulps had a very different approach. Claiming to be based on real events (although in fact stylized by literary conventions), the Canadian pulps told stories set in the far north or the rural west, featuring Mounties and policemen restoring the social order after it had been disrupted by brutal criminals. The battle between good and evil often had an ethnic dimension in the pulps. “The heroes of these true crime tales were officers named Morgan, Clarke, McGill, Taylor, Russell and Alexander, many of who had distinguished themselves on the battlefields of Europe in the Great War,” Strange and Loo note. “By contrast, their nemeses had names like Courvoisier, Vermilyea, Koenig, Zablotny, Radko, Alikomiak and Watanabe.” As with this pointed observation on the ethnicity of the characters, Strange and Loo frequently use the pulps as a window into the mindset of the past, a way of examining assumptions that were so widely shared that they were never articulated. With sensitivity and care, they use the pulps to chart out attitudes towards sexuality (love triangles frequently led to murder), family life (broken homes breed crime) and even economic prosperity (the characters in these stories were marked by hard-scrabble days of the Great Depression and willing to kill over small-change goods). Given that the Canadian“true crime” magazines bolstered traditional morality and supported the social status quo, the fact that the pulps were controversial becomes even more curious. Of course, the true crime genre was only one branch of the pulp tree. As we’ve seen, other genres, notably the hard-boiled stories of Hammett and Chester Himes, offered a darker and more radical vision of society. More to the point, in the conservative magazines analyzed by Strange and Loo, there was a disjunction between the content and the form, the sober social message was constantly belied by the covers promising excitement and danger. The moral at the end was crime doesn’t pay, but readers were lured in by pictures that made criminals look thrillingly enticing. The covers of the pulps get lavish attention in this book and are reproduced in all their flashy glory. Strange and Loo are also nicely attentive to the total package of the pulp magazine: aside from the covers, they keenly analyze and reprint the ads, which were in fact more daring than the stories. Mail order companies used the dingy corners of the pulps to sell goods that reputable stores wouldn’t carry: smutty cartoon books, guides to birth control, novels offering the lowdown on lesbianism. “Here are gathered in one pleasure-laden volume, all the indispensable fittings for every gay buckaroo,” reads the ad for The Playboy’s Handbook by George McCoy. “An open guide to fun and frolic – to a rakish reputation – and to a maiden’s heart.” In the covers and ads we can see what was scary about the pulps: they excited appetites that society was fearful of. Yet the stories in these same magazines reinforced a strict code of moral rectitude designed to keep desires in check. Like so much of popular culture, the pulps were a two-faced phenomenon, awaking unruly dreams while preaching the necessity of accepting the world as it is. In True Crime, True North, Strange and Loo have written a model popular history. While fun to look at and amusing to read, their book doesn’t talk down to readers or shirk the genuine complexity of the material. Using true crime pulp magazines as an entertaining jumping off point, they help recreate the mental universe of ordinary readers in the 1940s . Despite what Warshow thought, the pulps didn’t emerge from the “underside” of society. Rather they issued from a society where readers were internally divided by conflicting desires. With their contradictory packaging, these pulps offered an uneasy reconciliation between private fantasies and society’s requirement of order and decency.