Crime-Mystery-Detective Stories | Erin A. Smith (essay date 2000)
Erin A. Smith (essay date 2000)
SOURCE: Smith, Erin A. “The Hard-Boiled Writer and the Literary Marketplace.” In Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines, pp. 18-42. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.
[In the following essay, Smith investigates the pulp magazines, such as Black Mask, that developed the hard-boiled detective story.]
Into this underworld of literature most of us never dive unless, like Mr. Hoover's Committee on Recent Social Trends, we are curious about the literary preferences of those who move their lips when they read.
Vanity Fair, June 1933
It is not pleasant to think of the immature minds and mature appetites that feed on such stuff as their staple fodder, but there is no ducking the fact that sensationalism is the age-old need of the uneducated. The steady reader of this kind of fiction is interested in and stirred by the same...
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