Gang Pulp
Acknowledgements
A frosty mug of thanks to the world’s leading Harold Hersey authority, John Gunnison, for assistance in compiling this volume.
Glorifying the American Goon
By John Locke
Legendary editor, Harold Hersey, rose through the ranks working for publishers Street & Smith, Clayton, and Bernarr Macfadden. In late 1928, he established his own company, Magazine Publishers, popularly known as The Hersey Magazines. He called it the “Easy Credit Era”; five-thousand dollars launched the line. Thirteen titles were introduced from October 1928 through May 1929. All but two were pulps. They covered the field, from aviation to western to crime to romance, a typical “hope-for-a-winner” strategy, as Hersey put it in his 1937 book. Pulpwood Editor.
The third title introduced, with a cover date of November 1928, was The Dragnet Magazine. An above-the-title banner on the cover advertised its contents as “Detective and Crook Stories.” The cover painting was adapted from the 1928 Paramount film, Ladies of the Mob. December’s cover adapted art from another Paramount entry, 1927’s Underworld, the first in a new wave of popular gangster films. January’s cover revisited Ladies of the Mob, after which the covers sported homegrown concepts. We should further note that another Paramount gangster film. The Dragnet, was released in May 1928. So it’s quite apparent that Hersey, in New York, was attempting to mirror Hollywood’s success.
Another crime title, The Underworld, was obtained from the Eastern Distributing Corporation after its publisher, J. Thomas Wood, experienced financial difficulties. Renamed The Underworld Magazine, it debuted under the Hersey swastika seal with the issue of December ’28. Wood’s version had not been a gang pulp, however. It reprinted detective and mystery fiction from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur B. Reeve.[1] Under Hersey’s hand, it presented “new detective, gangster, and mystery stories.” the “new” assuring readers that the reprint policy was dead.
Both Dragnet and Underworld included healthy doses of gangland stories from authors like Henry Leverage, an ex-con who started his writing career in Sing Sing, Anatole Feldman, and Armitage Trail, author of the novel Scarface, basis for the 1932 gangster film. In Pulpwood Editor, Hersey barely mentions The Dragnet, but says of Underworld:
I was asked to take over The Underworld Magazine, a periodical that had been on the newsstands for sometime. Having been aware (weren’t we all?) that the public fancy was engrossed with the amazing spectacle of racketeers enjoying a fabulous prosperity in the period of The Noble Experiment, when the newspapers made heroes out of the great gangsters, I decided to concentrate on this theme in The Underworld Magazine.
He omits Hollywood’s influence from his account. It dignifies the editor to be seen as reflecting Life itself in his work, when in fact popular culture trends were as large a calculation in creating the product.
The motivations are murky (Writer s Digest called it “agreeing to disagree”), but by the end of the summer, 1929, Hersey had resigned from Magazine Publishers, leaving it in the hands of his co-founders. Aron Wyn, an editor at Dell, was brought in to run the magazines. The chain, with about half the Hersey-created titles surviving, became known as the Ace magazines. The Underworld, still owned by Eastern Distributing, returned to the editorial control of J. Thomas Wood who continued it as an original fiction magazine. Both Dragnet and Underworld continued Hersey’s editorial policies, at least at first.
Hersey, presumably with financial backing from Macfadden, started the Good Story Magazine Company, known also as the Red Band or the Blue Band magazines for the diagonal stripe running through the cover background. In a ridiculously abbreviated time, he had the company up and running. Twelve new titles hit the newsstands with cover dates ranging from October to February 1930. Admittedly, most of the new magazines turned out to be notable obscurities: Western Outlaws, Love and War Stories, Thrills of the Jungle. Some were started as experiments, with low expectations. But in November debuted one of his greatest career successes, the first pure gang pulp, Gangster Stories. The seed he’d planted in Dragnet and Underworld now bloomed in full. Gone was the mix of conventional detective and mystery stories. Gangster gave the reader a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling underworld. Hersey had ceded the mainstream, preferring to look for his fortune on the margins. With Gangster, at least, the strategy worked. The pulp sold well — apparently about 40,000 copies per issue initially. The formula, and the success, was quickly repeated with Racketeer Stories, with a cover date of February. (For the record, a racketeer runs a bootleg liquor operation, a speakeasy, or some other illegal operation; gangsters supply the muscle.) Hersey had finally found the independent success he’d been pushing toward for nearly two decades. But life can’t be that sweet — can it — in the early days of the Depression? Something had to go wrong — and it took the form of a backlash against Gangster and Racketeer. As quickly as Hersey had gotten the magazines onto America’s newsstands, the censors pushed back.
In the remainder of this essay, we’ll explore the nature of the gang story; we’ll examine what happened, how Hersey responded, and how the pulps were affected. Additionally, the book collects nineteen stories from the first year of the gang pulps, from both before and after the controversy left its mark.
Hersey gave few editorial guidelines for the gang titles in the writers’ mags, making him unlike, on the other extreme, science-fiction editor Hugo Gernsback who provided a lengthy, detailed outline of do’s, don’ts, and philosophy. Numerous authors appear regularly in Hersey’s gang pulps, a stable of reliable wordsmiths who couId deliver the highly-specialized product on schedule. Hersey would have given prospective freelancers the standard advice: read a couple of issues to get an idea of what’s required. Today, we must follow in the footsteps of the outsiders, but, still, it’s difficult to draw a line between Hersey’s dictates and the inventiveness of his authors.
In a letter published in the June 1933 Writer’s Digest, Ralph Daigh, editor of the new (and short-lived) Nickel Detective, wrote: we don’t “care for the ‘in the groove’ gang story. That does not mean that stories with gangdom as a background are barred.” His remarks came well after the period in question, but get at the main idea. The pure gang story took gangland out of the narrative background, and made it the foreground. The main characters became gang members or close associates. The gang story broke the mold of good guys versus bad guys, by sliding the moral spectrum all to the dark side. The conflict became merely bad guys versus really bad guys. The merely bad guy played the role of the hero, of course, and claimed his dubious moral high ground through toughness, loyalty to fellow gang members, kindness to his moll. The really bad guy was the squealer, the double-crosser, the coward, the rival who violated territorial boundaries — the rat.
1
The first issue of Wood’s