January 18, 2004
Pulp Fiction and the Man of Bronze
I love pulp fiction. I'm not writing here of the movie—though that is one of my favorite flicks. No, I mean the lurid magazines and paperbacks of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. I grew up listening to rebroadcasts of OTR (old-time radio) Flash Gordon, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mickey Spillane (what can I say, my parents were liberal), and loving the romanticism of the '30s and '40s. There is something very engaging about the ingenuousness and naivete of the pulp fiction writing of that period.
To this day I get a real kick out of films like The Phantom, The Rocketeer, The Shadow, anything with Bogart and Bacall. I've got a quite a few MP3s of OTR shows like The Shadow, Nero Wolfe, and Flash Gordon. When I began loading these up into my TiBook iTunes program the other day I had the bright idea of looking on the Web for pulp fiction novels that had been digitized.
I figured that the copyrights would have expired and I should be able to download them to use with my MobiPocket reader on my Palm Vx. I found this great site, Blackmask Online, that has an absolute ton of pulp fiction novels.
The original idea that some of these might be available on the Web came from having seen the Doc Savage film on satellite recently. I've only seen one Doc Savage film (I don't believe that any more have been made or are planned) but the back story and characters seem very well developed for a 110 minute film. That's not to say that it was a terribly good film (maybe the 12 minutes cut out of the American release would have made it more intelligible) but it was probably a decent attempt to render the characters in the books accurately. (As an aside, I heartily recommend the modern pulp fiction flick
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the 8th Dimension. Make sure to see the fully restored version as it is much, much better than the butchered version commonly shown on network TV)
Apparently, there were hundreds of Doc Savage novels and his adventures spanned a couple of decades (real-time). I know that I've got dozens of Shadow episodes over about a fifteen year period. These are great old recordings with the commercials intact. Undoubtedly taken off 78-rpm vinyl, each episode is about 22-23 minutes long.
My mother tells me that while growing up in Ireland she would hear episodes of The Phantom regularly on the radio.
Now if I could only find them.
Posted by artandscience at January 18, 2004 01:11 AM