FICTION

DANGER IS MY BUSINESS: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines, 1896-1953, by Lee Server (Chronicle Books: $27.50 cloth, $17.95 paper; 144 pp.). They were named after the paper they were printed on, a substance much too common for the lurid dreams and breathless fantasies that filled their pages. Progenitor of both paperbacks and comic books and one of the great bursts of 20th-Century popular culture, the pulps were magazines to conjure with. Deftly chronicled by Lee Server in this marvelously illustrated short history, these energetic journals lived too hard, too fast to survive. “Thriving on unconstrained creativity, held accountable to few standards of logic, believability, or ‘good taste,’ ” Server explains, “the pulps were literary dream machines, offering regular entry to intensive worlds of excitement, danger, glory, romance.”

There were pulps for all tastes, from Western lovers to fanciers of romance to science fiction addicts. Top writers could pound out 2 million to 3 million words a year, coming up with titles like “The Priestess of Shame” and “When the Death-Bat Flies.” Walter Gibson, who created “The Shadow,” wrote 282 novels about this greatest of pulp heros in his career and was known to type so hard and fast his fingers bled.

Though no one thought so at the time, the pulps turned out to have lasting value. They provided a place for everyone from Tennessee Williams to Louis L’Amour to cut their teeth and they were the first home of such icons as Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian and the Doctors Savage and Kildare. And if it weren’t for the pulps, writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich and H.P. Lovecraft might never have had the nerve to write a word. So look on their passing, oh you mighty, and weep.