Pulp Fiction Writers

Brown, Fredric (pulp fiction writer)

  (1906-1972) “A genius of sorts,” his friend and fellow writer Walt Sheldon called Fredric Brown. “He was a compulsive storyteller; and made up stories or bits of stories in his every waking moment. Wherever he went he would look at something or somebody .. . and say to himself, ‘What if?’” That compulsive imagination, […]

Brown, Carter (A. G. Yates) (pulp fiction writer)

  (1923-1985) The hard-boiled detective story had slowly, steadily made its way around the world in the years following its invention in America in the early 1920s. The original stories and novels were distributed in other countries with great success and certain foreign writers began to attempt to copy the form. By the 1930s the […]

Brody, Marc (W. H. "Bill" Williams) (pulp fiction writer)

  (?-1990) Marc Brody was both the byline and protagonist of dozens of sexy thrillers written between 1955 and 1960. Brody was a tough American newspaperman, in later years a television crime reporter, who pursued hot stories and even hotter women in popular softcover digests, and a few comic topic versions, put between covers by […]

Burnett, W. R. (William Riley Burnett) (pulp fiction writer)

  (1899-1982) Also wrote as: John Monahan, James Updyke W. R. Burnett is one of the godfathers of crime fiction. He virtually introduced the realistic professional criminal as protagonist to modern popular literature and was instrumental in establishing the parameters, and the cliches, of the gangster story in fiction and in film. Burnett’s first novel, […]

Burroughs, Edgar Rice (pulp fiction writer)

  (1875-1950) The February 1912 issue of All-Story, a popular pulp magazine of the day, marked the professional fiction-writing debut of Edgar Rice Burroughs, a 37-year-old roustabout who had failed at a dozen vocations from gold miner to salesman. In six installments, All-Story published Burroughs’s strange and imaginative fantasy (under the pseudonym of Normal Bean) […]

Cain, Paul (George Sims) (pulp fiction writer)

  (1902-1966) Also wrote as: Peter Ruric Paul Cain, otherwise known as Peter Ruric, whose real name was George Sims, from Des Moines, Iowa, produced a small but superb body of work in the early 1930s. A favorite of Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw—Dashiell hammett’s great acolyte in the pulps—Cain took Hammett’s sharp, smart, hard-boiled […]

Cain, James M. (pulp fiction writer)

  (1892-1977) Dashiell hammett, Raymond chandler, and James M. cain are the father, son, and holy ghost of American hard-boiled literature. Appearing on the cultural scene—that is, as respectable hardcover authors—at well-spaced intervals between 1929 and 1939, each brought his own separate but equally powerful and influential style to the new form of realistic/poetic crime […]

Butler, John K. (pulp fiction writer)

  (1908-1964) One more first-rate, forgotten writer from the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s, Butler wrote taut, vivid hard-boiled prose and swift, satisfying stories. He stuck to the short form or the novelette in his magazine work and moved on to movie writing when many of his peers were writing the novels that would […]

Busch, Niven (pulp fiction writer)

  (1903-1990) Niven Busch’s place in the pulp fiction hierarchy is largely due to his authorship of the 1944 novel Duel in the Sun, a strikingly innovative western that brought psychological dimension, a female protagonist, and sexual sensationalism to the ordinarily conservative, manly, and modest genre. Duel is the story of Pearl Chavez, a beautiful […]

Chandler, Raymond (pulp fiction writer)

  (1888-1959) In 1933 Raymond Chandler was a 45-year-old failed poet, recently fired from his job as the manager of a small California oil company. It was the height of the depression, and Chandler found himself at loose ends. He was not the artist he had once dreamed of becoming nor the well-paid businessman he […]

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