Pulp Fiction Writers

Yekuana Roundhouses

  The Yekuana live amid the rainforests of southern Venezuela, along the banks of the river Orinoco and its tributaries. Their traditional dwellings are communal roundhouses large enough to house several families. They have walls of wattle and daub and a huge conical roof, thatched over, through which the central pole protrudes, pointing directly upwards […]

Aarons, Edward S. (pulp fiction writer)

  (1916-1975) Also wrote as: Edward Ronns Aarons was a writer of lending-library, paperback, and pulp crime and espionage fiction for virtually his entire adult life, taking only a few years off to attend Columbia University and to serve in World War II. His early mystery novels were credited to a pen name, Edward Ronns, […]

Adams, Cleve (pulp fiction writer)

  (1895-1949) Also wrote as: Franklin Charles, John Spain The missing link between Dashiell hammett and James Ellroy, Cleve Adams wrote rambunctious, violent, corrosively cynical private eye fiction from the mid-1930s until his untimely death from pneumonia in 1949 at the age of 54. Like Hammett and many another pulp star, Adams found his way […]

Abdullah, Achmed (Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff) (pulp fiction writer)

  (1881-1945) Achmed Abdullah was born Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff to a grand duke father and a highborn Afghani Muslim mother in czarist Russia. Raised in Afghanistan, where he assumed his Asian title of Prince Nadir Khan, he was educated at Eton and Oxford, then became a gentleman officer in the British army, keeping the peace […]

Alter, Robert Edmond (pulp fiction writer)

  (1925-1965) Alter is remembered chiefly for two novels, paperback originals from the 1960s. Swamp Sister (1961) and Carny Kill (1966), both Fawcett Gold Medal topics played out against classic low-class milieus of sleazy softcover fiction in the early 1950s: the southern swamp in the first and the traveling carnival in the latter. Indeed, the […]

Allison, Clyde (William H. Knoles) (pulp fiction writer)

  (?-1972) Also wrote as: Clyde Ames The subject of a posthumous cult following for his once obscure, now hotly collected paperback spy spoofs of the mid-to-late 1960s, Clyde Allison, the pseudonym of William H. Knoles, ranks among the more talented and tragic figures to come through the paperback jungle. Knoles immigrated—from where we do […]

Allen, Richard (James Moffat) (pulp fiction writer)

  (1922-1993) Simmering behind the good vibes of hippiedom and swinging London as the 1960s came to a close was another, less friendly British cultural movement, one built not on peace and love but on suspicion, resentment, racism, and violence. Media reports exposed the rise of white, working-class youth gangs, new cults of juvenile delinquency […]

Allain, Marcel (pulp fiction writer)

  (1885-1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874-1914) “Fantomas.” “What did you say?” “I said: Fantomas.” “And what does that mean?” “Nothing. . . . Everything!” “But what is it?” “Nobody. . . . And yet, yes, it is somebody!” “And what does the somebody do?” “Spreads terror!” The famous poster introduced a new literary creation, super-criminal […]

Ambler, Eric (pulp fiction writer)

  (1909-1998) Also wrote as: Eliot Reed If Eric Ambler was not the inventor of the “modern” spy novel—that title must go to the English novelist Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) for a single, autobiographical work, Ashenden—he was certainly among the first few authors to establish the boundaries and possibilities for such a genre. Sporting left-wing sympathies […]

Ambler, Dail (Betty Mabel Lilian Williams) (pulp fiction writer)

  (1919-1974) Also wrote as: Danny Spade This obscure hard-boiled novelist deserves greater acclaim as a rare female holding her own amidst an otherwise fraternal order of hack crime fiction writers in postwar Britain. Under the Ambler and then Danny Spade pen names, she churned out a series of tougher-than-tough detective novels about a hard-drinking, […]

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