I recently finished reading The Dime Detectives, Ron Goulart’s comprehensive history of the genesis of modern American detective fiction. The 238-page journey took me much longer than it should have, because a demanding writing schedule since the beginning of the year has pushed recreational reading to the margins.
Published in 1988 by Mysterious Press, The Dime Detectives takes a deep dive into the fictional gumshoes who flourished during the golden age of the pulps – roughly 1920 to 1950—and the army of writers who brought them to life. The book has been out of print for several years, but I found a used copy for less than $20.
After an opening chapter that explains the advent of the pulps in the early 1900s, Goulart starts with Nick Carter, a detective who actually worked his first cases in the serialized dime novels of the late 1800s before he was reimagined and reintroduced in Detective Story in October 1915. But the archetypal private detective – the tough-talking knight-errant who has proven himself to be sufficiently capable with his fists and his gun to survive well into the 21st century – really starts to take shape in the pages of Black Mask in the early 1920s.
Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were the primary architects. Their signature characters – Race Williams, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe, respectively – collectively established the blueprint for just about everyone and everything that followed, not just in the pulp era but for the next hundred years of film, radio, comics, television and paperback novels.
Although best known for creating Perry Mason – the crime-solving defense lawyer who appeared in eighty-two novels and a handful of short stories – writer Erle Stanley Gardner also developed numerous masked avengers, phantom investigators and other offbeat characters throughout the 1930s. Gardner’s hall of fame included The Man in the Silver Mask, The Patent Leather Kid, Speed Dash, Lester Leith and others.
The Dime Detectives also spotlights the lesser known but talented and prolific writers of the era. Among these were Frederick Nebel, whose most memorable contributions were his adventures of MacBride and Kennedy, published in Black Mask. McBride was a hardboiled homicide cop on the police force of a fictional town called Richmond City, and Kennedy was a frequently inebriated newspaper reporter who served as MacBride’s ever-present foil, mercilessly needling the detective but also assisting in many of his investigations.
Also among the underrated fictioneers was Norbert Davis, who wrote for Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly and other pulps from the early ‘30s until his death in 1949. Davis created two memorable characters, bail bondsman William Dodd and Max Latin, both of whom made their first appearances in Black Mask in the early 1940s. Goulart explains that Bail Bond Dodd “was usually found in cheap saloons, run-down boardinghouses, and dingy civic buildings, the parts of the world where those on the fringe are to be encountered.”
Max Latin, meanwhile, was the owner of a dingy restaurant, an unlikely side hustle for a private detective. Regardless, he “enjoyed a reputation for being on the crooked side, but he was actually a relatively honest man,” says Goulart. “The idea that he was on the wrong side of the law helped him in his detective work, making it easier for him to get information and to move about in the shadier parts of town.”
Goulart devotes an entire chapter to the various private eyes who appeared in Spicy Detective Stories. The most memorable of these was Hollywood-based detective Dan Turner, created by Robert Leslie Bellem, whose prose was loaded with quirky and comical private-eye slang. Turner chased scores of unsavory characters operating in and around the movie industry during the 1930s. He was popular enough to eventually star in his own magazine, Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, which ran from 1942 to 1950.
All of the above are just a brief sample. The Dime Detectives is loaded with insider history and lore about hundreds of other characters, the writers who created them and told their stories, and the scores of ten-cent magazines in which their work was published. Through it all, Goulart focuses primarily on historical facts, but he does offer an interesting bit of social commentary in his very first chapter – not just about detective pulps, but about pulp fiction in general, and about mainstream literature as a whole:
“Cheap, popular fiction has been deplored ever since it struggled into existence in the nineteenth century. Some concerned critics and commentators in every era have been fearful the stuff would corrupt youth. Every mass media hero from Deadwood Dick and Frank Merriwell to Superman and Spider-Man has been viewed with alarm. Often, too, though not openly stated, a class element is involved, a resentment on the part of some that the peasants have been allowed to learn to read at all.”
Goulart (1933-2022), was a direct descendant of the pulp fiction tradition that he writes about in The Dime Detectives. In a career that spanned nearly sixty years, he wrote mystery, science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories, often using one of several pen names, including Chad Calhoun, R.T. Edwards, Joseph Silva and many others. He also wrote more than seventy novels that were part of long-running adventure fiction series, including Flash Gordon, The Phantom (writing as Frank S. Shawn), The Avenger (writing as Kenneth Robeson), and others. The Dime Detectives is just one of nearly twenty nonfiction books he wrote or edited about the history of pulp fiction and comics.
In his final chapter of The Dime Detectives, he asserts that “the history of the popular arts can be seen as a history of one format supplanting another: pulps taking over from dime novels and fiction weeklies, talkies replacing silent movies, LPs easing out 78s. Pulp magazines were done in by two of the most formidable mass-entertainment innovations of the twentieth century – the paperback book and television.”
I don’t entirely agree. Copies of Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, The Shadow and countless other magazines have long since disappeared from the newsstands, but for many of us, the spirit of the pulps is alive and well.